Open Source Business Intelligence

Now that I have installed MySQL (and finally found out I only installed the server, no client access tools yet), I need some tools to connect, and maintain my database. The first one I am going to check out is the SQLyog MySQL GUI. 

Here is the command to check out if MySQL is installed: ps -A | grep "mysql, the result is 

5002 ?        00:00:00 mysqld_safe
5058 ?        00:00:00 mysqld

I ran into the interesting blog of Chris Webb who has been working on Microsoft BI as well as on open source. He mentions some other open source tools, besides Pentaho and Jasper he has been working on.

• Olap4j this looks more like a development environmen, but Chris claims it also can connect to Microsoft Analysis Services 2005. And since I am also quite familiar with the Microsoft suite, this can be great.
• Cubulus, check out the demo at http://alxtoth.webfactional.com/, Cubulus is an analytic engine + slice&dice web interface on top of relational database (MySQL at the moment)

I found out about another opensource db. Yes, I’m kind of new in the open source playing field. Anyone experience with this ? Does it support al the nice things that I know, such as functions, stored procedures ? Actually, the same goes for HsqlDB, I also found out about that just last week. How do these 2 compare to MySQL, as that seems to be the open source database market leader.

Actually, some Google work tells me that HsqlDb is the continuation of Hypersonic.

Pentaho Open BI Suite, Pre-configured Installation (PCI) – MySQL
Ready to serve. Pentaho Open BI Suite is our application already configured and deployed into JBoss. Connected to a solution repository, it is ready for you to store and run your own solutions. To help you get started, it includes a sample solution for demonstration and reference.
Version: 1.6.0.GA.863 (GA)

I’m downloading now. Hopefully it will connect to my ‘hidden’ MySQL installation. Stay tuned.

Yesterday, I installed MySQL through the terminal command. I was surprised to find out that I could not find any presence of MySQL on my Ubuntu machine. So, I ran the installation command again. This gave me the message:

$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
mysql-server is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Am I too much in Microsoft mode now ? is there another way to start MySQL, or am I trying to find an Enterprise Manager type of tool that isn’t there. If there is any help for me, please reply to this post.

Discovered a great blog today, called Open Intelligence. Hosted by Erik Swenson. Erik is the founder of OpenReports and ObjectVisualizer.

Open Office is installed together with Ubuntu. I found out today that I can create databases from within the Open Office toolset. The database used is the HSQLDB: “100 % JAVA Database”. I will give it a go to find out what this offers, but my idea is that I will need MySQL when it get’s nasty (high volume datawarehouses).

After finding out about Apatar, now I run into Arrah. “The world’s first open source data profiler and data quality tool”. Let’s check it out !