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Pentaho and Jaspersoft: Good Alternatives To Bigger-Name Software?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Jeff Cogswell, the developer who recently offered a 'gentle' rant about the current state of software development and installers, returns with a comparison of two players in the open-source BI space, Pentaho and Jaspersoft. 'If you believe the hype, the business-intelligence tools offered by some of the world's largest software companies also pack a substantial punch,' he writes. 'But these systems are often difficult to install and maintain, not to mention downright expensive. Small and medium-sized businesses typically can't afford software platforms that cost upwards of several hundred thousand dollars, but that doesn't mean they're cut off from BI tools in general. In fact, there are some decent open-source options.'"
Those are products which have different licenses for the "community" edition and the "real" ones. I've used both and even the commercial editions are quite unpleasant to deal with, plus they steer you to a proprietary stack, just like more mature offerings (Cognos, BO, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.)
Commercial BI products are usually either brutal or too clever for their own good. Those two, Jasper and Pentaho, are more of the same, plus they feel like you need to have the guy who designed them to sit besides you and explain what to do. And community/forum-driven support is not that great.
The most interesting open reporting solution is definitely BIRT, it runs circle around Jasper:
http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/
lucm, indeed.
Stop associating open source with buzzwords, Point .
:)
These are essentially reporting tools, and I saw mention of ETL, which seemed conceptually similar to DTS/SSIS packages. Reporting is a part of business intelligence sure, but if it's the only intelligence your business has, you probably don't have one, or won't have one for long.
Also, I started my IT career writing reports, I don't miss it, if I was to even consider writing reports for a business, I'd require BIDS & SSRS period, then again probably I probably wouldn't do it anyways
I wish the summary explained what BI is, for all of us that are too lazy to click on TFA and find out ourselves.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
I have about 30 years experience as a SAS user and have done a number of installations. However SAS is expensive and can be very complex to install. Pentaho is extremely easy to install and it's ETL tool is very powerful with an intuitive user interface, especially when you realise all this data processing power is available for free! When I look at the power of open source tools like Pentaho I think Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS, probably has a few restless nights.
How much of the BI tool do most organizations use?
The real issue is that most businesses spend all this money for the tool they barely utilize. They let their Corporate EGO get in the way, figuring that they deserve the best out there. While all they really want is a basic Reporting Tool, or a dashboard. As well they get caught in the we may need it in the future trap. Where most of the time the cost of migrating from an old system to a new one, is less than the continued maintenance and support of the bigger product.
For most organizations they just need a number of small self developed applications/Database Queries, mixed with simple reporting that display key metrics.
However they will tend to buy the beast of the system use the basic features, where setup is the same as developing it yourself + the Extra cost of the system + Extra Time, because the system was designed to do more that means the implementation staff if going thru extra hoops to get things done.
They buy the tool, then they come up with projects for it. While they should be going the other way, list the projects they need done and find the tool for the job.
I am OK with the Multi-Million Dollar systems, they do their job however companies should get smarter on deciding if and when they should switch over.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Where is BIRT in this list? BIRT is open source and a top level Eclipse project. It is fully featured out of the box, is extensible, and is implemented and backed by several large companies. It is supported by every major Open Source reporting server (Pentaho, SpagoBI), and for enterprise conscious folks there is a commercial option. And it does away with that god awful banded report design model that is a hold over from the ancient Crystal Reports in favor of a more flexible report design paradigm. My guess is that Pentaho and Jasper paid SlashBI more money for a front page slashvertisement.
... and I like them. I'm a geologist who got stuck handling all of the lab data for my company. We make building products (think stucco and plaster- lots of mixture designs and standardized test procedures). We're also a small business, and we don't have the money to hire someone solely to handle IT or even to buy one of the commercial packages.
What we've got: a PostgreSQL database that holds data for Manufacturing and R&D.
The problem this solved: reporting.
Originally, I wrote a custom program that queried the database and spat out reports in Word and Excel formats. It was a nightmare to maintain. Want a new template? Write more code. Did the database just get divided into separate schemas for Manufacturing and R&D? Alter source code. I used Pentaho's Metadata Editor to map the database to a set of virtual tables. My report templates (which are much easier to design graphically, even though Report Designer's mechanism for calculating values is rather awkward) query off the metadata, which means that I can make changes to the database itself and simply update the metadata rather than individually update a bunch of report templates. It was more work up front, but doing things this way has saved me *a lot* of time that I would otherwise spend packaging data into reports. This is not the sort of thing you would use for reports where the tests you run are highly tailored to a product being developed, and you need to write a detailed analysis of the project. This is for form reports (like pass/fail QC test reports) where you need something like a product code, a test result, and a red "fail" or green "pass" text color, or project reports where you run a set series of tests and are typically only changing the project name, customer/location, and about a paragraph of analysis.
I've used their ETL tool to batch import CSV files into databases, and it's reasonably straightforward. I do have the BI server set up, tested, and using PostgreSQL as a backend, but it's honestly just not something we use.
Who will do well with this stuff, if your business even needs a reporting solution: can you configure Tomcat, use a database, and muddle through tutorials? Are you reasonably good at teaching yourself new things? You'll probably be fine once you get the hang of it. (The documentation can be a little lacking.)
Who will not: in general, anyone who hasn't configured servers, used databases, or done a little ad-hoc programming is going to be completely lost. Are your coworkers trying to re-implement relational databases in Excel? They're going to have to be taught what any of this stuff even is before it begins to make sense to them.
Dreaded Microsoft has SQL Server packages including SQL Server, SSIS ETL tools, SSAS OLAP and SSRS Reporting with licenses starting well under $2,000. Much better than Oracle's cobbled-together BI at a fraction of the price.
Hold your disgust and consider this fully functional, enterprise quality BI suite. Good support and good community, too.
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That's terrific. I've been looking for some open source retard.
The frontend analytics tools are cool and that's what the users will see and use - but the main thing missing in the opensource BI space are the deep library of views and templates for the big ERP systems like Oracle EBS/PeopleSoft/JDE/Fusion & SAP. I don't want to spend thousands of hours writing my own views and ETL routines just to create standard reports. If you are developing your own software and bundling Jaspersoft/Pentaho/etc as your reporting engine, fine - but if you are a corporate IT shop using a major ERP system, then I would rather buy one that didn't make me reinvent the wheel.
If you want support for it ... good luck.
We were looking at Pentaho two years ago. Filled in the web form, called their number four times and every time I just got an answering machine.
Nobody ever called back.