The state of open source BI was relatively slim not too long ago. There were a variety of possible toll sets one could use for ETL (Clover<\/a>, Enhydra Octopus<\/a>), some initial OLAP components (Mondrian<\/a>, JPivot<\/a>), some portal frameworks for dashboards (JetSpeed<\/a>, JBoss Portal<\/a>), and some databases with maturity for DW situations with smaller volumes (MySQL<\/a>, Postgres<\/a>). Things have been heating up this past year, and we should review whats going on in the Open Source BI realm. The lead is buried, make sure you check out Pentaho<\/a> at the bottom<\/i>.<\/b><\/p>\n CA’s Open Source release of Ingres<\/a><\/b> Netezza<\/a>\/DATAllegro<\/a> are using open source<\/b> GreenPlum<\/a> (aka Metapa) takes another shot<\/b> Mondrian<\/a>\/JPivot<\/a> releases<\/b> BIRT<\/a> and JasperReports<\/a> are actually pretty good<\/b> Pentaho Nation<\/a><\/b> What does this all mean?<\/b> Business Intelligence software, databases, and their supporting hardware are expensive. I mean really, really expensive (hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars). Many people working in the Business Intelligence\/Data Warehousing fields have seen their “operational application” colleagues adopting open source solutions (Linux, JBoss, Eclipse, Apache, etc.) but have seen little attention paid to the software […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,9,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAlbeit a funny OSI approved license<\/a> (there are many provisions which will scare away the OS purists, and make others at least think twice about including it in their products or service) Ingres is officially open source and free. Ingres has some pretty significant “enterprise” features<\/a> including replication, partitioning, and “in the works” linux clustering (a la RAC). This is great news because Ingres is a rather mature database and is better suited for large DW volumes than MySQL and PostGres. It is noticeably (and perhaps critically) lacking the vibrant community required to increase uptake. At this point it feels like CA is still the only one “interested” in Ingres. This might change, but I believe the funny CATOSL<\/a> has hindered acceptance from open source communities.<\/p>\n
\nThese two providers of DW appliances<\/a> are using open source databases as part of their solution. It’s a mixed technology stack, which means that unless you purchase the appliances you will benefit from none of the work that these two companies have put into their implementations. One uses Postgres, the other uses Ingres. There must<\/b> be quite a bit of technology surrounding it to make it actually work for corporate DW environments. Netezza is actually doing rather well I believe<\/a>, and some of the bigger vendors are starting to “see them on the radar” as a player in the space.<\/p>\n
\nWhen Metapa wasn’t getting the traction with marketing their inexpensive proprietary Clustered DB implementation they figured they needed something to get more traction. Open Source is powerful enough that even a few years into the hype it still attracts attention. They relaunched themselves<\/a> as an Open Source solution and are sponsoring the BizGres<\/a> project (a few extensions to PostGres that are useful for BI environments) along with allowing the single instance version<\/a> of their product to be used for free. I don’t think they’ll get the OS community embrace they desire because people are discerning these days; the only interesting work GreenPlum is doing is related to their MPP and shared nothing clustering technology<\/a> which is very much NOT<\/b> open source. I don’t think they’ll get the OS thrust they expected, because they are only opening their kimono an inch, not even a halfway mark.<\/p>\n
\nThese two projects underwent new releases this year that provided the most visible part of an open source DW\/BI system their legs. While not comparable to commercial OLAP interfaces they are certainly suited for ISV\/Developers to embed in their application. These are great components for including in a project, and if your report consumers don’t really care to write their own reports (a la graphical report builder) and just want to pivot and page this could be an excellent, inexpensive solution.<\/p>\n
\nTwo commercially backed (one by Actuate<\/a>, the other by JasperSoft<\/a>) projects that are building the basis for business quality reports. Don’t turn off your Crystal installation yet because these both have a way to go, but they’re improving at a steady pace.<\/p>\n
\nThis is truly the most exciting thing I’ve found in the Open Source BI space, and they’ve just begun their work so I’m running on faith at this point. Industry veterans<\/a> who are passionate about BI and<\/i> open source have pooled their minds and money (they’ve made $$ from previous entrepreneurial activities) to build a pure, 100% open source distribution for BI. They are collecting various open source projects, building their own components and releasing the whole thing as open source. A partial list of the projects they are planning (no official distro yet): Mondrian OLAP server<\/a>, JPivot<\/a>, Firebird RDBMS<\/a>, Enhrydra ETL<\/a>, Shark<\/a> and JaWE<\/a>, JBoss<\/a>, Hibernate<\/a>, JBoss Portal<\/a>, Weka Data Mining<\/a>, Eclipse<\/a>, BIRT<\/a>, JOSSO<\/a>, Mozilla Rhino<\/a>.
\nThe company will follow in RedHat<\/a> footsteps and make money on support, training, and consulting. Their plans are ambitious, but they are focused on assembling and configuring all these disparate projects into a comprehensive platform that will be at least comparable to the “big boys” at Hyperion, Cognos, Microstrategy, etc.
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\nThey are engaging the community, clearly understand the need in the space, and are committed to the ideals of getting paid for solutions instead of software. They are certainly strong in the presentation, dashboard, BPM\/workflow, OLAP end of the spectrum but don’t appear to be including much in the ETL\/DW end (there is some, but it appears to be for data movement and loading as opposed to building a DW). I’m not sure if it’s strategic or not, but it might makes sense. Most people adopting an open source BI platform for their reporting users will feel comfortable rolling their own ETL\/DW for the backroom. It should also be noted that they haven’t made any releases yet, so what we’re seeing is all conceptual now but they’ll be rolling something out sometime in 2005. It appears as if the founders have a track record of “doing what they say they’ll do.”<\/p>\n
\nThere are three things that will happen as the Open Source and BI worlds start dating.<\/p>\n\n