Firms release open-source business-intelligence tools

Three business-intelligence vendors have released a package designed as an open-source alternative to proprietary database offerings.

Greenplum, JasperSoft and Kinetic Networks unveiled on Wednesday a software and hardware bundle that includes data analysis tools and an early version of Greenplum's specialized business-intelligence database. It is available through the Greenplum-sponsored Bizgres Project.

The collection is built around Greenplum's Bizgres, a version of the PostgreSQL open-source database designed specifically for building large-scale analysis databases.

Greenplum also released on Wednesday version 0.7 of Bizgres at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore.

Open-source databases are having an impact on the relational database marketplace overall, particularly for low-end offerings, according to analysts. PostgreSQL and MySQL are examples of two general-purpose databases that are widely used.

With the bundle, Greenplum and its partners intend to bite away at the dollars spent on business intelligence, an area that has seen relatively steady spending over the past few years.

JasperSoft offers an open-source reporting tool, and Kinetic Networks provides consulting services and data-moving tools.

Another open-source business-intelligence offering is available through the Eclipse Foundation. It's called Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) and was started by business-intelligence vendor Actuate. The project released version 1.0 in June.

[sandeep_giri]

openi.org: open source BI application

Look at OpenI (http://www.openi.org) as well. We released OpenI last month as a web application to analyze data in OLAP cubes and publish interactive reports. Future versions will incorporate support for analyzing data in RDBMS as well as in data mining models and statisitical models.

The success of open source BI depends on having well-defined open source BI stacks that provide all the key components of a BI infrastructure -- namely Database, OLAP, Visualization, and Statistics/Data Mining. It is imperative that the current open source BI players collborate with each other to publish reference BI stacks, and enable the community to develop their specific BI apps on top of it.

At OpenI, our focus is more on the end users (like an analyst) themselves and as such, we tend to work more on the usability issues -- the goal being that a user should be able to easily download and install the BI application, and start analyzing their data resources right away without having to write any code or manage complex configurations.

Also - the open source development model lets us colloborate with other open source projects, so it creates a great atmosphere to collaborate with BIRT, Jasper, Pentaho, etc. rather than being forced to compete as in the enterprise software world.

We would love to hear community feedback on OpenI.

Sandeep,
Project Lead, openi.org

Open Source OLAP

Take a look at PALO (www.palo.net)

Palo is an open source olap server, where all data is held in RAM. Due to this response time will be fast.

An excel add-in provides a user friendly front end to analyse data and produce reports. Due to values being directly written back to RAM it is particularly suitable for applictions such as budgeting, forecasting, analysis, BPM.

It will work on both Windows and Linux and has APIs available for the more knowledgeable users.