Forum OpenACS Q&A: Curious what reporting / BI / Dashboard solutions people here use?

1: Curious what reporting / BI / Dashboard solutions people here use?

Posted by Brian Fenton on 12/28/16 03:49 PM

What 3rd party tools do people use with OpenACS for business intelligence and data analysis (or just general reporting)? I imagine there's nothing unusual about OpenACS that lends itself to more or less compatibility with a particular approach, but am still curious as to what people use.

thanks for any replies
Brian

2: Re: Curious what reporting / BI / Dashboard solutions people here use? (response to 1)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 12/28/16 05:45 PM

Hi!

Please have a look at these slides:

http://www.slideshare.net/project_open/po-devreportingoptions101006-5434243

They are basically still valid, even though we have re-implemented most of the graphical stuff using Sencha ExtJS.

The highlights:

- Data-Warehouse using ROLAP technology: That's not the fastest way to do OLAP, but it's OK for < 10M rows in the DB...
- Reporting-Engine: This is a bit like "Crystal Reports" with counters, subtotals, drill-down etc. Unfortunately, there is no graphical designer, so you need to know your way around.
- 2x2 diagrams with drag-and-drop: This is not only a two dimensional bubble-chart. You can also just drag-and-drop the bubbles around to update the underlying values in the database.

Just grab the latest ]po[ V5.0.beta2 from http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/project-open/files/project-open/V5.0/ and check it out. This "community" edition doesn't include the data-warehouse, though.

Enjoy!
Frank

3: Re: Curious what reporting / BI / Dashboard solutions people here use? (response to 1)

Posted by Maurizio Martignano on 12/28/16 07:17 PM

Hello Brian,
most of my customers are used to/require QlikView (http://www.qlik.com).

When I have the freedom to chose, if my solution has to be based on Microsoft technologies, then I would use Power BI (https://powerbi.microsoft.com), if it has to be based on Java, then I would use Talend (http://www.talend.com/).

Anything you may find on OpenACS risks to be quite beyond these tools, technologies, platforms. But all of them are able to read/connect to a PostgreSQL database, so... there you are...

Quite often, what I found is that the customers want to have an easily generated Excel file. Then they take over and do with it whatever they want/need.

Hope it helps,
Maurizio

4: Re: Curious what reporting / BI / Dashboard solutions people here use? (response to 1)

Posted by Brian Fenton on 12/30/16 10:27 AM

Thanks Frank and Maurizio!

5: Re: Curious what reporting / BI / Dashboard solutions people here use? (response to 1)

Posted by Antonio Pisano on 01/02/17 05:56 PM

Another tool worth mentioning is http://www.knime.org/

Its pros are a very mild learning curve, support for many libraries and tools (R, weka...) and nice GUI. It is open source and cross platform (based on Eclipse) and can connect to a variety of data sources including postgres.

I have used it for some projects with good satisfaction. This said, Talend or other tools capable of compiling their workflow are probably better performance wise.

6: Re: Curious what reporting / BI / Dashboard solutions people here use? (response to 1)

Posted by Brian Fenton on 01/02/17 06:00 PM

Nice tip. Thanks Antonio!