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 !

At the moment I am configuring an old desktop, to become my open source system. Ubunty 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) is already installed. So far, I like it. I am used to working with several versions of Windows, it takes only little time to get familiar with the interface. One very interesting thing is the way to install new software. It can be done through the Synaptic Package Manager, a whole library, or you can offcourse find downloads on the www. Right now I am installing MySQL, and I simply took the installation command from the website ( sudo apt-get install mysql-server), and I don’t have to bother about choosing a mirror or location, everything is arranged for me. So, after this, I will install a choice of BI Tools on this machine, and will be building BI solutions.

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.

Mike Ferguson writes an interesting post on his blog. One of his statements is “10. The price of BI platforms is being pushed downward by several forces including the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 impact, the open source BI vendors (e.g. Jaspersoft, Pentaho), and the DW appliance vendors e.g. Data Allegro, GreenPlum, HP, IBM BCU, Kognitio, Netezza and others. BI vendors with high price points and ‘rental pricing’ may have to re-think their pricing strategy to compete otherwise customers may find cheaper equally good alternatives. “

Mike also predicted a big acquisition by one of the major vendors, and he was right about that !

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”

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 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.

Welcome to the BI Team blog, dedicated entirely to open source Business Intelligence. We will investigate the BI marketspace, historically dominated by Cognos, Business Intelligence, Informatica, Information Builders, Oracle, and a bunch of others. We will try and find all the available open source BI initiaves, and investigate them, from a technical, functional, and other aspects we can think of as well. Doesn’t this sound fascinating ?

But, let me first introduce myself. I am Templeton “Face” Peck, friends call me Face. I will introduce co-authors as well. The first co-author for this blog is John “Hannibal” Smith.