More OSBI (Open Source BI)

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)

 

Installing Pentaho on Ubuntu

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.

 

Open Intelligence

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

 

Arrah

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 !

 

Apatar

Today, I stumbled upon Apatar. They are in beta – connecting data.

"Apatar is the leading provider of open source software tools for the data integration market. Apatar brings data integration to the companies who previously found proprietary solutions expensive and difficult to implement. Apatar’s goal is to provide more than 100,000 users with its freely downloadable product by the end of 2007. Apatar provides support, training, and consulting services for its integration solutions. "

Interesting: Apatar supplies open source software, but since that doesn’t heat up the fire, they are the supplier of support, training and consulting. Very smart.

Anyone has experience with Apatar ? The interface is very much Kettle alike. That makes it look a lot like SQL Server Integration Services as well. Intuitive data flows, bringing data from point a to point b.

I can’t judge on the software yet, but the company has an interesting offering. I think a lot of similar companies will rise over the next period. Embracing open source, not making money on licences, but making money on the services and support side.

 

Next OpenOffice release to include Pentaho BI

An interesting article on Yahoo:

“Pentaho’s reporting engine, Pentaho Reporting, will be integrated with the next release of OpenOffice.org, version 2.3, which is due out in the second half of this year, according to Lance Walter, vice president of marketing at Pentaho. Sun and Pentaho had been in discussions for around a year about integrating BI functionality into OpenOffice.org, he said. Pentaho competes against fellow open-source BI players like JasperSoft and proprietary vendors like Cognos and Business Objects”

 

Pentaho ctd.

Shutting down Tomcat did the trick. The demo is rolling now. I will be looking into it in more detail over the next few days. But so far, my impression is that it is a very easy to use demo, which gives you a pretty quick insight into some over the functions of Pentaho. So, thumbs up so far !

After looking into the demo, I will be installing Pentaho from scratch. But, first things first.

If you want to check out the demo yourself, here the URL: http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=140317&use_mirror=&filename=pentaho_demo-1.2.0.534-GA.zip

 

Pentaho installation

I am making my first steps in evaluating Pentaho. That means downloading the software, and installing my Virtual PC environment  (Windows 2003, TomCat and MySQL preconfigured) with Pentaho. I have downloaded software from the Pentaho website (community/downloads), and picked out the Pentaho Open BI Suite (Pre-Configured Installation) version for Windows, Release 1.2.0 GA (Build 534). This version promises me: “Ready to serve, Pentaho Open BI Suite is deployed into a pre-installed and configured JBoss Application Server. In addition, it contains ready to use solution repositories including sets of reports demonstrating functionality and to help you get started. The latest version contains a preview of features of the upcoming Reporting Server.” This is an 121 Mb download. The release notes can be found on SourceForge.net. What I also read is “Extract and run”. Promising. The first question I have now (after extracting, that part is easy), is WHAT do I run. I have a start-pentaho.bat file, with the following commands:

@echo on
setlocal
set PENTAHO_PATH=%~dp0
set JAVA_HOME=%PENTAHO_PATH%jre
set PATH=%PENTAHO_PATH%jre\bin
cd data
start start_hypersonic.bat
cd ..\jboss\bin
start run < lines.txt
Hm, let’s first look at the “English – Getting Started with the BI_Platform 1.2.0″ guide, which is intended for people who want to get the platform up and running in 10 minutes. It’s 15:57 now. Some delay, as the files still had to be extracted to my Virtual env.  The documentation is really well structured, as you only need to read the green boxes, when you want to install the stuff on a Windows box.

Two command boxes open, they should, after 30 seconds, tell me “Pentaho BI Platform server ready”. And, localhost:8080 should display a nice Pentaho starting screen. However, none of the above happens. 16:29: Let’s do a reboot.

I’ll be back.

 

JasperSoft and Pentaho

JasperSoft and Pentaho will be the first targets. We will investigate this thoroughly, and both Face (on Pentaho) and Hannibal (on JasperSoft) will be back to report about what we can build with those tools.