Re: BI tools and postgresql

Hi there,

> I've looked at Pentaho and Jasper, but I have not had much success.
> (Can't remember exactly the issue right now, but I recall that they
> seemed to be huge products and I could never quite figure out how to
> do something simple with them.)

My advice here is to analyse the requirements and keep separated the BI
components.

Open source complete BI suites offered by BIRT, Pentaho and Jasper - to
name a few - are really good products. I would suggest that - if you
need to use the full product - you contact their sales representatives.
Get more information, evaluate them, compare the products and pick one.

Otherwise, I would simply look for specific products for each of the BI
phases:

* good ETL products are Kettle or Talend, both in Java
* for reporting, I suggest Jasper report (with iReport), in Java again
* for data mining you can look at Weka or, for in-database data mining
algorithms in PostgreSQL, MADLib

I am not sure if you need some tools for OLAP as well (I prefer to
manage cubes and data marts within Postgres), you might want to look at
Mondrian for Pentaho (Java).

In my experience so far, in general the most common tools are for ETL
and reporting. Data mining is less common (unfortunately), but in
general it comes after the first two.

All of the above technologies, require you to invest human resources
and time in training.

I prefer to see the BI framework as a set of components, rather than
one single product. That gives you more flexibility and allows you to
change a tool for a specific component in the future without changing
the whole architecture.

Of course, I take it for granted that you have already thought about
the data warehouse layer (in case you have one).

Cheers,
Gabriele

--
Gabriele Bartolini - 2ndQuadrant Italia
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
Gabriele(dot)Bartolini(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)it - www.2ndQuadrant.it