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I'm a Reporting Engineer, so business intelligence is my speciality. I do not work for a company that sells BI software or services, I'm just an administrator/power user. I've used BIRT, Crystal Reports, Crystal for Eclipse, MS SQL Reporting Services, Excel PivotTables with SQL Analysis Server cubes, Proclarity, Cognos ReportNet, Cognos Impromptu and Cognos PowerPlay.

Business Objects seems to have a pretty solid platform these days, but the company tends to use underhanded advertising techniques and make dubious claims in their marketing material. I'm not sure how they are once you are a customer, but I have been unimpressed with their sales pitches to me. Microsoft SQL 2005 has some pretty neat tools bundled. They have really come a long way, and they are fantastic on the back-end or for use internally to the IT department, but they really have nothing in the way of user-facing front-ends that I would consider ready for "prime time". BIRT looks promising, and within a decade I would say it will be fantastic software.

I highly recommend looking at Cognos Series 8. The back-end is a web services based framework and the zero client front ends blows everything else I have seen out of the water. It is simply the best platform I have *ever* used, though it can be a bit pricey. They used to work with you quite a bit on the price; not sure if they still do that with their new named-user-based licensing model. Their support is excellent as well. I was an early adopter of ReportNet, and Cognos flew an engineer down to our site on their dime to troubleshoot a critical bug; we were not a big site, at only 60ish end-users.

Call up a Cognos rep, they are usually willing to come on-site to do a demo.

You just need to look an an interface such as Cognos's Report Net to see the merit of AJAX. You honestly cannot tell the differance between this app and a window application! WYSIWYG report editing and not a single postback (see http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessinte lligence/product-images/reporting-1.html for screenshot).
It's absolute genius. Sure this must be one brilliant implementation out thousands of very poor or not so incredible implementations of this technology. But is shows you exactly what can be done and what will be done in the future.
Pure inspiration.

Okay - I'll take a stab at this. I've been using pivot tables rather heavily since being introduced to them in the last 12 months or so. The step up from a pivot table is a full-blown business intelligence (BI) tool.

Pivot tables allow you to "slice-n-dice" your data. Say you have a set of data that contains the following items: Business unit, sales person, sales territory, customer, customer buying group, order number, item information, cost and revenue. It's all just row after row of data, got it so far?

With SQL or just a big honkin' Excel sheet you can easily calculate data in one dimension (i.e. select/calculate all orders by salesperson X).

It's much more difficult to work in more than on dimension with data in this format. This is where pivot tables are really handy. Say you have the above data, but need to quickly produce a report to show revenue, by customer group, by item, by salesperson, sorted by date. That's more tricky.

This is a bit simplified; with a pivot table you simple select your data "elements" customer group, item and salesperson on the left, your date element on the top and then drop your "revenue" data element (subtract COGS from revenue) in the middle of the pivot and all the fields are automagically calculated. The best part is this all happens from your big, honkin' list of data. You didn't need to figure out any tricky SQL joins, etc when you got the data. You let the pivot table do the work.

Where it gets nice is the "slice-n-dice" capability I mentioned. Say you present this fancy report to your boss who says, "Great! Now show me the same by customer and not customer buying group!" All you have to do is replace the "customer group" element with the "customer" element and all the data is recalculated as fast as you can drop the fields. You didn't have to go back and touch your source data at all, it takes literally seconds to change how you represent the data.

There are a lot of OLAP (online analytical processing) tools out there. We use Cognos' Powerplay tool. It's nothing but a pivot table on steriods. It works on cubes (collections of data) which we produce from our ERP system. Then we can look at and present our data in the OLAP tool extremely easily. We even have executives using this tool (albeit at a less productive level than the hardcore BI geeks).

If you've ever seen someone whiz around with a pivot table or a BI tool you'll understand why I'm rather excited by all of this. It's powerful stuff and makes looking at data, trends in data and "drilling down" into data painless and rather fun. To see it for youself, whip up some bogus data in Excel and run the pivot table wizard (data - PivotTable and PivotChart Report...). It will walk you through your first pivot table in about 2 minutes!

Cognos Powerplay does this too, and even better than excel.

ReportNet Demo Online

ReportNet Demo Online

Yeah, they work for Corel, Alias, Hummingbird, MKS, Cognos, Zero Knowledge, Blackberry, Nothern Telecom ...

While I personally work in a Cognos/SQL Server shop and am therefore probably a bit biased, I seriously think you should take a look at Cognos' offerings. Their software is great and probably about as leading edge as you can get in the OLAP world. While we're using their PowerPlay and Impromptu products, the direction they're going at the moment is towards ReportNet which is a new product they just released a couple of months ago. Browing their website I came across this online demo that might help you in coming up with a justification for such a system (registration required, but worth it IMHO).

Anyway, if you're looking for help from someone who deals with OLAP systems - drop me a line. ;-)

While I personally work in a Cognos/SQL Server shop and am therefore probably a bit biased, I seriously think you should take a look at Cognos' offerings. Their software is great and probably about as leading edge as you can get in the OLAP world. While we're using their PowerPlay and Impromptu products, the direction they're going at the moment is towards ReportNet which is a new product they just released a couple of months ago. Browing their website I came across this online demo that might help you in coming up with a justification for such a system (registration required, but worth it IMHO).

Anyway, if you're looking for help from someone who deals with OLAP systems - drop me a line. ;-)

While I personally work in a Cognos/SQL Server shop and am therefore probably a bit biased, I seriously think you should take a look at Cognos' offerings. Their software is great and probably about as leading edge as you can get in the OLAP world. While we're using their PowerPlay and Impromptu products, the direction they're going at the moment is towards ReportNet which is a new product they just released a couple of months ago. Browing their website I came across this online demo that might help you in coming up with a justification for such a system (registration required, but worth it IMHO).

Anyway, if you're looking for help from someone who deals with OLAP systems - drop me a line. ;-)

While I personally work in a Cognos/SQL Server shop and am therefore probably a bit biased, I seriously think you should take a look at Cognos' offerings. Their software is great and probably about as leading edge as you can get in the OLAP world. While we're using their PowerPlay and Impromptu products, the direction they're going at the moment is towards ReportNet which is a new product they just released a couple of months ago. Browing their website I came across this online demo that might help you in coming up with a justification for such a system (registration required, but worth it IMHO).

Anyway, if you're looking for help from someone who deals with OLAP systems - drop me a line. ;-)

I'm going to preface this by saying I'm an expert in this field, so my comments may be biased.

OLAP concepts have been around for quite some time, although as a mainstream product only since the early '90s. Today the two major players in the market are Microsoft and Hyperion Solutions, with Cognos a distant third. (To be fair, there are plenty of other players, these are just the three largest). I personally have worked extensively with both Essbase and Analysis Services, and can honestly say that both have very strong points, but generally speaking I have found Hyperion's Essbase to be superior as a whole to Microsoft's Analysis Services.
The original thread commented on how little mainstream press OLAP has received, which I wholeheartedly agree with. However, it is worth noting that many, if not most, large businesses have OLAP implementations (I can't find a source, but if I remember correctly, 499 of the Fortune 500 companies have an implementation.). Considering the market is about $3.5 billion, the products are definately being used extensively. Granted that is a drop in the bucket of the total relational marketplace, but it is hardly insignificant.
Personally, I strongly believe the lack of knowledge outside of the Finance departments of the world about the concepts is directly tied to the lack of exposure the concepts receive at the collegiate level, which continues to focus on relational databases as the primary storage of enterprise data (I am not implying that OLAP database can replace relational databases, they are truely a complimentary product tailored for specific use). The lack of a standardized API & querying languages is definately a problem for the industry, one which the large players have tried to address, with limited success. On the flip side, the industry has pushed (rightly or wrongly) toward selling the total package, with both the backend database and a suite of front end data entry & reporting tools all in one. This makes for an easy sell to many customers, but doesn't encourage much innovation from the outside (IMHO, the front ends to OLAP products are the weakest link, and really do need the most development).
Ironically, one of the best online resources I've found is IBM's web site. They repackage Hyperion's Essbase as DB2/OLAP, so their Redbooks on the concepts are slanted toward Essbase, but they have the most extensive source of free information on the concepts I've seen from a commercial vendor.

The E in ERP does stand for Enterprise, but that's more for marketing the name than anything. What the products actually aim to provide is a toolset for planning all of the resources managed by an organization.

A good ERP system when implemented to support solid business processes can drastically improve a company's productivity and operating efficiency. This is true for small, medium and large companies. The reason that most people associate ERP with LARGE corporations is because they typically implement a tier 1 ERP such as Oracle, SAP or JDE, which are the most well known (and expensive).

There are tons of small and mid-sized organizations that employ less well-known ERP systems. In fact these days it's damn near impossible to grow from small to mid-size without implementing at least a portion of an ERP system. This is why it is so important to have open source projects like Campiere. Trust me, the small companies do NOT have tons of cash to throw around (i.e. they are not evil).

The funny thing about ERPs though is that they have become largely Resource Tracking systems rather than planning systems (with the exception of production planning, which stems from MRP). The actual planning job is left to solutions that sit on top of the ERP like Cognos Enterprise Planning, Analytic Applications and SAP xApps.

The E in ERP does stand for Enterprise, but that's more for marketing the name than anything. What the products actually aim to provide is a toolset for planning all of the resources managed by an organization.

A good ERP system when implemented to support solid business processes can drastically improve a company's productivity and operating efficiency. This is true for small, medium and large companies. The reason that most people associate ERP with LARGE corporations is because they typically implement a tier 1 ERP such as Oracle, SAP or JDE, which are the most well known (and expensive).

There are tons of small and mid-sized organizations that employ less well-known ERP systems. In fact these days it's damn near impossible to grow from small to mid-size without implementing at least a portion of an ERP system. This is why it is so important to have open source projects like Campiere. Trust me, the small companies do NOT have tons of cash to throw around (i.e. they are not evil).

The funny thing about ERPs though is that they have become largely Resource Tracking systems rather than planning systems (with the exception of production planning, which stems from MRP). The actual planning job is left to solutions that sit on top of the ERP like Cognos Enterprise Planning, Analytic Applications and SAP xApps.

Visualizer

Most commercial vendors of business intelligence solutions, e.g. Cognos and Business Objects, have a web solution for building custom reports.

Some OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing - i.e. reporting) stuff off the top of my head that I've had contact with:

Cognos

CrystalReports/Info

ActiveReports/ActiveCube by DataDynamics

Cyberprise

My company tried Cognos and it seems to be a heavy hitter to satisfy the PHB's. It's got data mining/driling down, stored static cubes so you don't need to go back to the DB (makes it fast) and when you drill down till you are out of data, you can go into the DB off the cubes. You can run reports right off the cube data. Unfortunately I wasn't a part of that venture but from what my co-worker(developer) says, it was pretty slick... YOU DO PAY through the nose for it.

Crystal Reports: Very slick & easy to use. Almost idiot proof to run them off the web BUT the web engine is single threaded and you can only run one at a time on the web server (useless!). If your DB is slow and 5 people ask for a report each at the same time and they all take 5 minutes, the last person will be waiting 25 minutes...you know that by then they've already clicked refresh 15 gazillion times (or the default install of IE has given up). The ActiveX and JAVA controls that come with Crystal 7 that allow you to view reports through the browser are sweeeeet. You can export reports to RTF and a couple other formats right from the browser. Oh ya, it's also VERY easy to design reports and the COM interface makes it easy to work with. I demo'd CrystalInfo but select boxes confuse our users enough that we didn't want to give them the ability to create reports on a whim if they dont' understand the underlying tables. You can pay some comapny 10k U.S. for a multithreaded Crystal Print engine. Crystal7 is reasonably priced.

On the same lines, ActiveReports (and ActiveCube) by Datadynamics is quite a bit more useful although no where as easy to use as Crystal & doesn't come with the handy pre-built functions to manipulate/shape data (but I like doing stuff from scratch ;). It is an ActiveX Designer plugin for VB. You crateall your reports in VB and then create a generic report object to wrap around those activeX designers. And the best thing of all was that you could run multiple reports simultaneously which beats the pants off of Crystal. The export controls aren't as full featured though and there aren't many export options but there are enough that you can get data into pretty much any app. Besides, too many options confuse users ;) ActiveReports is reasonably priced.

Cyrberprise was another thing my company tried but I can't say much about it as our interest leaned more torwards COGNOS.

Anyway, currently we are using a crappy buggy 16-bit Helpdesk software by Applix (transitioning to a home-brew Oracle Forms app instead) and the reporting was buggy and useless..not to mention they save the users password in a text file in the root of the system drive...but I digress.
This Oracle thing (started out on web...too flaky, going client/server unfortunately) needed web reporting so all the Crystal Reports we had suited it perfect to run via ASP (Active Server Pages). I designed a system that allowed me to put all sorts of dynamic web selection forms in front of the crystal engine and pretty much run any report we had. I can add options to the selection form just by inserting into the DB and it pops up on the web page.
This allowed users to run pre-defined report templates against the system to extract the stuff the needed. All in all, it works great (except for the slow DB and single threaded Crystal report engine) and I'm in the midst of modifying it to be able to run Crystal and ActiveReports (so I can port everything to ActiveReports).

As was previously mentioned, you could use PHP script or PERL or C/C++ on Linux to do your stuff but that would require a lot of work.

Sorry I couldn't give you any Linux info. Perhaps these companies have something coming down the pipe.

--Clay

Firstly the link in one of the other posts didn't seem to work so try this.
Secondly which SAS programming language don't you like ? Base SAS ,SCL, webAF or webEIS.
I agree that SCL syntax can be a bit annoying at times but the next version of SAS V8 to be released early next year has much better syntax more like c++ or java. WebAF is just java with a lot of extra classes added to it and a ide so you know what to expect there.

But the main reason for using a product like SAS is that you don't have to rewrite all the statistical and analytic back end procedures. However if you don't like the front end there is a standard server for Open OLAP server available from sas as well as several different web front ends.

For more info check
SAS OLAP
Cognos OLAP
Oracle OLAP

An aside SAS is releasing htmsql 2.0 for Linux as well as all its standard platfroms on tuesday. Does this mean that all of SAS is to be ported to linux ?

Grem

COBOL (80%)
Powerhouse (12%)
Visual Basic (3%)
JCL/Scripts/Macros/Etc. (5%)

Home/Fun/Personal Web:

QBasic (MS-DOS) (45%)
Perl (45%)
Visual Basic (10%)

And before you laugh at me for being a COBOL programmer, keep in mind that I made a ton of money last year, working from home in the buff. So there. 8^)