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Are Open Source Reporting Tools Ready for Primetime?
Z0mb1eman asks: "My company is considering replacing our aging CrystalReports with an open source solution. We are currently doing our research, and the choices seem promising -- JasperReports, Actuate-backed BIRT, and Pentaho, which seems to combine other open-source reporting tools. All have some level of commercial support, but are they ready to replace established solutions like Crystal Reports or even Actuate? Is your company using an Open Source reporting tool, and what have been your experiences with such tools? Are there any other choices we should consider? What should we expect if we make the decision to switch?"
Real men need nothing but awk.
... on Slashdot of all places. That alone should indicate the amount of apathy the open source community has towards this.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Sounds like a word in the educated pimp's dictionary.
pentaho -noun: A group of 5 hos.
Ideally, you need to have a pentaho on each corner you control.
At my former place (a Fortune 50 retailer), we used JasperReports for a lot of our internal reporting needs. Generating PDF's for the web-applications, XLS docs for the business folks, and using all OS/Free software to do it.
We used JasperAssistant to create the reports, training even non-technical folks on how to create the reports they needed. The reports they made weren't going to win awards, but they got what they wanted and we saved time.
Just be aware that the JasperReports libs do their own thread management (at least it did as of the pre-1.2 release) so be aware of running inside of a J2EE container. We chose to write an asynchronous app that utilized JMS and a java daemon that read the queue and processed the messages, storing the output as a BLOB in a db.
I was the first easy to use system that had powerful report creation. You can drag and drop from palette to create a layout which is pretty nice. It has smart charts (coloring based on marker values), PDF and HTML output. It supports POJOs (scripted), JDO, JDBC, Hibernate and is fully integrated with Eclipse if you are into that side of things.
Another good thing is that Actuate has really responsive support and there are lots of examples, tutorials, and online help, etc.
The only real downside so far - installation is a bear (they have promised to fix this soon) and there are still some bugs here and there (though they are responsive via newsgroup, bugzilla, and email.)
You haven't talked about why you'd want to switch. If something works, why change it?
Have you identified what your requirements are from a reporting tool, be it open source or commercial? Your definition of 'prime time' is totally dependent on this
- who will be writing the reports (techies, business folks, both)?
- what layout and formatting capabilities are absolutely needed?
- any really big reports? performance may be an issue
- what are the security needs - authentication, visibility, auditing, etc?
- do you need overnight automated report runs?
- what about bursting (automatically splitting a report into sub-reports based on department, product type, whatever)?
- do you need to integrate with custom developed software? what language+platform, etc?
The first point is particularly important - if business staff want to dolly up simple adhoc reports, then this will seriously narrow down the open source field pretty quickly.
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.
There's something other than "cat"?
"Are Open Source Reporting Tools Ready for Primetime?"
GNUvore is coming along nicely.
After spending the last two weekends trouble shooting JasperReports that it is very close to being ready for prime time... But I can also say it IS NOT threak safe!!!!! But now that I know this everything is fine.
I'm testing Crystal Reports, which seems to be the Oracle of reporting software. Everyone knows about it, there's a large support base, it's quite pricey, ($7.5k for essentially the stuff CleverPath did, only hopefully more intelligent) and if you put it down as a skill on your resume, it's worth something. We don't have very high demands (yet) but I'm reasonably sure that support on-hand (right here, right now) is a requirement, hence I don't think I'll be testing Jasper. The reports really are crucial to the business.
Haven't heard of the other solutions being thrown around; I'll give those a look too.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
I recommend the Open Souce 'Report Manager' to my clients. I use to use Crystal Reports then moved to Report Manager as a replacement when Crystal removed the report compiler and changed thier pricing structure.
Pentaho and Jasper Reports are excellent products. I'm totally lovin' the dashboard action in Pentaho. Between the two, about 500 of my clients employees use them everyday. The best part is how well they play with Postgres.
That said, they're both Java, which means they're a PITA to scale up when you're used to deploying with Debian.
Ultimately, the suitability of the software depends on your requirements, doesn't it? Do you require source? Do you require a lower cost solution? Do you require support? These are common reasons to evaluate open software replacements for commercial offerings. Chances are you won't find an open source solution that will match the features, functions and support of the commercial offerings available. This, I suspect, will change in time with projects like BIRT http://www.actuate.com/birt and companies like MARVELit http://www.marvelit.com/ and Pentaho http://www.pentaho.com/ adding functions, features and support. /.ers can give you a better answer than calling Cognos. :)
Highlight your reporting requirements and I suspect the
We were using Jasper Reports with IReport and OpenReports for about a year until management got jumpy and not being able to hire anyone with Jasper expereince and migrated to Crystal.
From my expeience it was great. The only thing it didn't do for us was Cross Tab reports but that was added after we'd migrated to Crystal. It's been around the longest and has a fairly nice base of third party apps. I had a look at some of the other solutions but at that time they were still in Alpha. It's nice to see that they've made lots of progress.
So personaly I'd recommend checking out Jasper for a day and going from there.
JasperReports has worked well for me in many situations, and the report file format (XML) is easy enough to work with, even without a designer front end. Performance in most use cases is respectable, and I didn't have to jump through a lot of hoops to get things running. Whenever I need "traditional" reporting, JasperReports is my first choice.
My current company is in the process of migrating away from Actuate e.Report, which has basically (but unofficially) been EOLed. For example, it'll run under Java 1.5, but every report logs an IOException during generation, and no fix is planned. Performance on large documents (read 1k+ pages) is unusable, and gets significantly worse as the page count increases (not exponentially, but worse than linearly). Oh, and don't plan on your users editing the RTFs it spits out - everything uses absolute positioning within the document, so the page doesn't reflow.
I spent some quality time with BIRT last month, but wasn't terribly impressed. Installation wasn't painless, and their underlying model assumes that your data is a flat, relational table. Our data is hierarchical in nature, and we would have had to either flatten it, or use tons of sub-reports to accomplish our goals. Additionally, the options for output format are pretty limited compared with other solutions.
We ended up setting with Windward Reports, for two main reasons:
1. They assume hierarchical data instead of relational.
2. Their design front end is any RTF editor, and produces editable RTF results (and can still output to HTML, PDF, etc).
Performance with Windward has been an order of magnitude better that e.Report in our worst cases, and they've been quite good about implementing minor new features that we needed.
A couple issues:
1. They're not open source, and are relatively pricey, especially when you're an Application Service Provider.
2. The code that is open (such as thier data adapters) has a strange license, and hasn't been actively cleaned up in a while. Their license requires that you submit any non-company-specific improvements made to a data adapter back to them.
3. Their documentation is not up to date with their latest feature set, so be prepared to look at change logs, or ask questions on their forums. On the other hand, their tech support has been excellent.
We considered a number of other innovative reporting solutions as well. Just make sure that the reporting solution you pick actually meets your data and user's requirements, and don't be afraid to look beyond the "standard" reporting systems if you have non-traditional needs.
Scott Severtson
Senior Architect, Digital Measures
Wow, my first accepted submission :) At last, an excuse to read Slashdot at work tomorrow!
I kept the submission fairly general, to avoid steering the discussion in any specific direction. Here are a few more details of our situation:
We're a small-to-medium business, and our reporting needs are relatively modest (at the moment - we are steadily growing). I would say no more than 10-20 people need to generate reports. Our software department is also quite small - we have a fair amount of in-house Java expertise, but no one who actually knows Crystal Reports. We're also using an old version, and the reports themselves are out of date. Our choices are to invest in a new version of Crystal, the time for one of us to learn it, and rewriting the reports anyway - or choosing an open-source Java solution and hope for the best. The constraint, as always, is very limited manpower...
Any feedback is welcome - I've seen some very good posts already, I'll have to read all the comments tomorrow in detail.
Thanks!
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Though its not open source, I would recommend ActiveReports. Extremely flexible, even gives you a drawing API, and its totally isolated from the backend (unlike crystal and such) - you just hand it a dataset (in .net) and off you go. In my consulting days, I swore by it. Very simple and robust, also quite affordable. Just my $.02 .
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
... and are any other reporting tools available in other languages, eg. C++. I know Crystal comes packaged as a COM object in MS land which makes it a language independant component, but what about integrating these OSS reporting tools into existing projects?
If you purchase a 3rd-party reporting tool you won't have control of the source code: if a problem arises or the company goes out of business or the software is upgraded then you may be forced into a migration. That won't happen if you use HTML.
Also many 3rd-party reporting tools (e.g., Crystal Reports) are priced on how many clients are connected at one time, etc. So you never quit paying. HTML is free.
Let me start with the answer that is required by my job title. YES. ;-)
Now, let's talk about what it really looks like. First "ready for prime time" means very different things to different people. If you're using each of the 72,000 features in Crystal Reports, you will definitely find that a lot of those features aren't available in some of the open source offerings. On the other hand, the open source offerings have some features that Crystal doesn't. But generally, a 22-year old reporting product has more features than your average open source reporting tool.
It's all a question of *what you need*. Oracle has a lot of features that MySQL doesn't have. There was an analyst at a major research firm who recently said that the open source databases were "years away from being competitive with the major proprietary DBs." I think that shows some ignorance. People are getting smarter about defining their requirements, and looking for solutions that address their requirements, rather than letting vendors define their requirements according to that vendor's feature list.
open source BI is in production. in a lot of places. For example, Pentaho is the owner and primary sponsor of the mondrian OLAP project. The project is mature, has been around for a while, is deployed at a number of sites, and has a solid and growing community. And we have other Pentaho users that already have Cognos, Business Objects, Crystal, or others. They're not ripping out those tools. At least not in most of the cases I'm aware of. But they're bringing up new departmental deployments, or extranets, and they're turning to Pentaho because we're a better technology fit for their application, and in some cases because the licensing model (per-CPU for us vs. role-based, named-user that some of the proprietary guys use) is far more attractive. Certainly we need to publish more and more customer success studies going forward, because these are the ultimate proof-points for "ready for prime time."
My last comment would be that not all open source BI is created equal. Not just at a specific feature-level, but in terms of the macro-level offering, and the model. You'll find open source reporting tools that require an upgrade to an expensive, closed-source platform to get BI platform functionality. Pentaho offers open source reporting, analysis, dashboards, and a BI platform, without requiring an upgrade to a proprietary technology. And at the feature-level, different tools have different strengths and weakness. Some offer support, some don't. etc.
And that goes back to your requirements, and your definition of "ready for prime time."
-Lance from Pentaho
Unfortunately, I find none of these are perfect. However, after scouting out the Open Source landscape and some Closed Source solutions, we've landed on BIRT, with the possibility of MS SQL Reporting Services. Our shop is about half and half Java or MS developers, which led us to support what best fits the developer (the primary creator of reports). As well, from our perspective, MS SRS or BIRT is free for us; if MS wasn't free we'd stick to BIRT.
What we liked about MS SRS was the powerful server backend with its own SQL server cache of reports; automated report generation and email; and an auto generated 'homepage' to navigate our collection of reports. Unfortunately to do report gen right, you need Visual Studio 2005 and some SQL tools, which can start eating upwards to 2-4GB on your box. As well the reports themselves I don't find to be as deep and powerful as say BIRT reports.
What we liked (and the one I'm sticking with) about BIRT was the creation of reports themselves is incredibly powerful, though the learning curve is a bit steep. As well, the community base growing behind BIRT and its current rate of growth has us excited that hopefully in the next year or two BIRT will grow into a much more mature platform. However, what I miss in BIRT that MS SRS has is the strong server backend, good strong caching of reports and the autogen 'homepage' for navigation of my report portfolio. To be fair, the server backend is lite and easy to scale in deployment if needed.
In the end, it's about the money and which trade-offs you are willing to stick with.
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I posted this earlier unintentionally under anonymous. It was more that I was not paying as close attention as I should have been than an act of cowardice as the name suggests. Anyways, I logged in this time and decided to post it top level: I work for Business Objects. In fact, I am the Product Manager for our new Crystal Reports for Eclipse offering. I attend a number of conferences with my job and often get asked this very question..."Why should I use your product over an Open Source Solution?" Open Source is free after all...isn't it? Well, in my mind it depends on what you mean by free. If you have the resources internally to committ your Developer resources to modify an open source project should it require it, then you may perceive this as being free. Based on my experience with Developer salaries it would not take long for a company to justify a $500 (or $700 as you quote) to by a fully supported and indemnified reporting solution. If your company's core competence is not in reporting then you really need to evaluate how much effort you want to put into modifying a reporting solution to fit your needs. On top of this, a number of companies have a business model based purely on supporting and indemnifying open source software. Let's take BIRT for example, if you want to deliver it in a solution that requires indemnification or if you require any formal support at all, you can expect to pay Actuate from $995 (plus $95 for cost of Designer) to $6995 http://www.actuate.com/products/techzone/birtrepor ting/birt_pricing/networkbasic.asp/ [actuate.com]. Business Objects includes indemnification and support in all of their products, which puts us at about half the cost of Actuate's lowest offering. On top of this, users need to answer these questions when choosing their reporting solution: * Do I need to support .NET and Java applications?
* Will I potentially need to expand my solution?
* Do I need support and indemnification?
* Can I dedicate Developer time and effort to fixing and maintaining my modified oss code?
So based on how you answer these questions an organization should be able to determine what is the best solution for them. Currently, we are the only reporting solution natively supported in both .NET and Java, which plays a large part in why we are the #1 reporting solution used by Developers.
If there may be a possibility that your solution may grow to require more "enterprise-level" features (e.g. fault-tolerance, scheduling, load-balancing and security) then you need to consider how well your current solution will grow. Ofcourse Pentaho claims to support BIRT, however Pentaho is largely unproven right now and still has a business model around providing support for the servers which starts at $1000.
Don't get me wrong. I love open source, I personally use a number of open source solutions, and of course Crystal Reports for Eclipse (http://www.businessobjects.com/eclipse/ [businessobjects.com]) is built on the Eclipse Platform. I am just trying to convey that Developers really have to assess their current needs and situations before choosing any reporting solution (open source or not). The misconception that open source solutions are free often ends up costing an organization a lot more in the long run because they never took the time to do an initial assessment of what they actually expect from the product. A lot of companies are making a lot of money off of providing support and solutions for open source software. There is a reason for this, and I think it's very important to include these "potential" costs whenever choosing a solution.
As for reporting technologies specifically, Crystal Reports has been providing solutions for Developers for over 13 years. We have a proven reporting solution rich with features that I can confidently say no open source solution matches up with. Sure, there will be features t
Can someone help me understand what this is all about? I thought that Crystal Reports was simply a tool that allowed people to generate their own database queries and design the output pages in the way they want. Frankly I've often wondered why Crystal reports was still relevant as most database applications include the ability to do such custom adhoc queries in the application itself.
But, then people start talking about "Business Intelligence" and all sorts of other stuff that I can't wrap my head around.
What is Business Intelligence precisely?
What sorts of reports are these reporting tools being used to create? I mean, what data is in the reports and where is the data being pulled from?
Why aren't these reports in the applications or at least the ability to create them?
Why would a developer use something like Crystal Reports instead of developing the application to do what it needs to?
Finally, is there anyone here that actually uses business intelligence on a daily basis that can describe what it is and how they use it?