Business Intelligence Software for Linux

To BI tools, you can provide a database (used to store your business

information) as input. BI tools will then allow you to map the raw data lying in

different tables in the database and establish relations between them. This can

be done visually or graphically via such tools. Next, BI tools can generate

custom reports based on the view of data that you desire and allow you to slice

and dice the data — ie, dwell further into graph-based reports from the top to

bottom.

Traditionally, BI tools, platforms and tools were expensive to buy, deploy

and maintain. They were proprietary and required proprietary databases. But

today we have Open Source and free to use (even commercial) BI tools which can,

in turn, use Open Source database like MySQL as the data source. In this article

we look at the options available in Open Source world to quench the needs of

Business Intelligence for a business.

Plug-in tools



The BI needs can be complex enough to demand a standalone suite. Or they can

be as simple as tying a few reports to an existing application — typically in an

application which is driving the core of your business. This is where the

reporting tool becomes a part or a plug-in of the developer's IDE (Integrated

Development Environment) which can be used by him/her to spruce up the output

via sortable, filterable and graphical reports. Talking about Open Source,

Eclipse (www.eclipse.org) is no doubt a popular Open Source IDE and BIRT

(http://www.eclipse.org/birt) is a plug-in which adds reporting capabilities to

Eclipse. BIRT can be downloaded as an Eclipse plug-in via Help>Software Updates.

Once you have selected a data source, generating a report with BIRT is like dragging and dropping columns and UI elements like text and labels. (source: www.eclipse.org)

Using the report designer a developer can design the report visually and

point it to a data source using Eclipse's built-in data source explorer.

Standalone reporting service



Using something like OpenReports, you can design, build, preview, modify and

deploy standalone reports which can then be shown in business applications (by

simply embedding the URL). Unlike Birt, OpenReports is a browser-based tool.

A report generated using BIRT in Eclipse. The report is filterable, sortable and can be exported in various formats. (source: www.eclipse.org)

The easiest way to get started with OpenReports is to download them with

Tomcat (a Java application server) from www.oreports.com. An advantage of it

being a standalone and browser-based service is that anyone with access to a web

browser like (IE or Firefox) will be able to build, generate and showcase

business reports. What's more, it provides a few add-on goodies like custom

access privileges, report scheduling and access audit.

With OpenReports you can schedule a report to be generated and sent to stakeholders via e-mail. (source: www.oreports.com)

A full-fledged BI suite



Pentaho (www.pentaho.com) is an Open Source suite for Business Intelligence and
analysis. The difference between Pentaho and other tools (mentioned above) is

that Pentaho is a suite of all tools required for a BI application which

includes tools for OLAP (Online analytical processing), report designing, data

integration (Extract, Transform and Load a.k.a. ETL), data mining and analysis.

The OpenReports report query can be written using a web browser which eliminates the need of any installed tool at the users' end. (source: www.oreports.com)

All these tools are based on Open Source products like Mondrian for OLAP,

Kettle for ETL and Weka for data mining. Hence it is a BI suite built using Open

Source products, bringing all of them to build a comprehensive platform.

With Pentaho, you can welcome persons from Business team with snapshots on Dashboard. Note the use of Google Maps to depict location.(source: www.pentaho.com)

Using the entire suite for effective Business Intelligence and analysis will

involve a steep learning curve. Plus, as said before, Pentaho is a bundle of

various Open Source tools. It may happen that you may not need all the tools.

For this, Pentaho's website provides a wizard driven download where you can

select what you need and what you don't.