Open Source Business Intelligence Tools: A Review
Amid Khatibi Bardsiri
1Seyyed Mohsen Hashemi
2 1Bardsir Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kerman, IRAN
2
Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, IRAN
Abstract
Nowadays, information and knowledge represent the fundamental wealth of an organization. The
organization can business and requirements needed by its use of Business intelligence (BI) justification.
Business intelligence is the process of transforming raw data into useful information for more effective
strategic, operational insights, and decision-making purposes so that it yields real business benefit.
Business intelligence joins as a key strategy for any organization to achieve a competitive advantage.
Business intelligence tools are a type of application software designed to retrieve, analyze and report
data.
In the paper, we consider a number of open source BI tools.
To understand the use of open source
BI tools better, it is of interest to consider which tools are available and what they are capable of. This is
the goal of this paper
.Keywords: Business Intelligence (BI), Open Source, Tool
1. Introduction
In the past, Decision-Support Systems (DSS) were independent systems within an organization and
had a weak relationship with other systems. Now, enterprise systems are the foundation of an
organization, and practitioners design and may implement BI to create a comprehensive decision-support
environment for management [1, 2]. Business Intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and
technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help organizations make
better business decisions [3]. In the organizations the information can be seen as a competitive advantage
over its competitors, knowing the core business and discover knowledge patterns in the daily and
operational processes is the way to achieve management effectiveness. Thomas Davenport [4] says BI
more as a set of technologies and processes to collect and analyze data for decision making. Negash [5]
explains Business Intelligence concept as “BI systems combine data gathering, data storage, and
knowledge management with tools to present complex internal and competitive information to decision
makers.” Today companies took advantage of Intelligence of its competitors to move their business to use
and efficient. Intelligence can gives a good feature business case reports and data analysis and
performance improvement company [6]. The value of BI for business is primarily said in the fact that
such systems cast some light on information that may serve as the basis for carrying out fundamental
changes in a specific organization, i.e. establishing new co-operation, acquiring new customers, making
new markets, offering products to customers [7]. Software suppliers provide users with BI tools and it can
be assumed that they have distinct views of what BI means. There are now mature and powerful open
source tools available in all categories, so it is now for the first time possible to make a complete BI
solution using only open source tools. To collect data about the tools, the Internet was searched for open
source tools in each category. The presented data was found by inspecting the products’ official
homepages as well as their documentation (if any), mailing lists and forums. In this survey paper, we
consider the capabilities of a number of open source tools for BI.
2. Tools
As some organizations are looking to reduce costs in their large Business Intelligence (BI)
deployments, they are hoping that open source gives them greater leverage for their money. Application
developers that are looking for a way to embed BI functionality into their applications initiate other open
source BI deployments. The open source tools are currently prevalent in business intelligent and those
description have been summarized in Table1.
Table 1: Survey on open source business intelligence tools
Tool Category Platform Description
Ingres DBMSs UNIX,
Windows
A commercially supported, open-source SQL relational database management system intended to support large commercial and government applications. Ingres Database is fully open source with a growing global community of contributors [8].
MonetDB DBMSs UNIX,
Windows
An open source column-oriented database management system developed at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands. It was designed to provide high performance on complex queries against large databases, e.g. combining tables with hundreds of columns and multi-million rows [9].
PostgreSQL DBMSs UNIX,
Windows
An object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software [10].
MySQL DBMSs UNIX,
Windows
The world's most used open source relational database management system (RDBMS) as of 2008 that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases [11].
Clover.ETL ETL Java
Used for processing and transforming large volumes of data and is usually employed in cases of data integration, data warehousing, data quality and cleansing, and data migration [12].
Pequel ETL Perl
Comprehensive & high performance data distribution & transformation system. Features a simple, user-friendly event driven scripting interface transparently generates & execs highly efficient Perl/C code [13].
Talend ETL Java
An open source software vendor that provides data integration, data management, enterprise application integration and big data software and solutions [14].
Kettle ETL Java
Pentaho Data Integration Community Edition (PDI CE) also known as Kettle. Pentaho Data Integration delivers powerful Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) capabilities using an innovative, metadata-driven approach. Pentaho Data Integration is increasingly the choice for organizations over traditional, proprietary ETL or data integration tools [15].
Apatar ETL Java
An open source ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) and data integration software application. Apatar’s user and customer
base ranges from small companies and individuals to large organizations such as the World Bank Group, Thomson Reuters, John Wiley & Sons, R.R. Donnelley, Autodesk, and more [16].
Scriptella ETL Java
An open source ETL and script execution tool written in Java. Its primary focus is simplicity. It doesn't require the user to learn another complex XML-based language to use it, but allows the use of SQL or another scripting language suitable for the data source to perform required transformations [17].
Octopus ETL Java
A simple Java-based Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) tool. It can connect to any JDBC data source and perform transformations defined in an XML file, and supports Ant and JUnit for creating databases and tables and extracting and loading data during a build or test process [18].
ETL
Integrator ETL Java
A Data Integration tool which can be used to perform extract - transform - load to build data warehouse] or data migration. This tool provide connectivity to a vast range of heterogeneous and diversified data sources including non database sources [19].
Mondrian OLAP
servers
Java
An open source OLAP (online analytical processing) server, written in Java. It supports the MDX (multidimensional expressions) query language and the XML for Analysis and olap4j interface specifications. It reads from SQL and other data sources and aggregates data in a memory cache [20].
Palo OLAP
servers
Linux, Windows
A memory resident multidimensional (online analytical processing (OLAP) or multidimensional online analytical processing (MOLAP)) database server and typically used as a business intelligence tool for controlling and budgeting purposes with spreadsheet software acting as the user interface [21]. JPalo Client and Web Client OLAP clients Java and Web
Tools to visualize and model data of a Palo or XMLA database. Their main purpose is Business Intelligence Reporting and Planning. With the API, programmers can easily model their specific needs [22].
JPivot OLAP
clients Web
A JSP custom tag library that renders an OLAP table and let users perform typical OLAP navigations like slice and dice, drill down and roll up. It uses Mondrian as its OLAP Server. JPivot also supports XMLA data-source access [23].
OpenI OLAP
clients Java
Developed by the company Loyalty Matrix from which commercial support was also available. The company has now been acquired by another company and its technology is being integrated into a closed source application. It is therefore not known if the OpenI project will continue [24].
REX OLAP
clients Java
A java client that provides easy-to-use GUI for browsing multidimensional data sources that support XMLA protocol. Rex also includes MDX editor and MDX Builder Tool [25].
FreeAnalysis OLAP
clients Web
A complete java (Eclipse RCP) and Web 2.0 (Dojo) application that provide OLAP functions against Pentaho Mondrian OLAP Server and other MDX/XMLA compliant cubes data-sources such as Microsoft Analysis or Hyperion [26].
JRubik OLAP clients
Java JPivot project components. The OLAP queries could be issued using MDX language [27]. JMagallanes Olap & Reports OLAP clients Java
An open source end user application for OLAP and Dynamic Reports written in Java/J2EE. Combines static reports, pivot table and charts. It reads from SQL and other data sources [28].
3. Conclusions
In Organizations discovering business knowledge is the process to achieve competitive edge over their
competitors and this is supported by Decisions Support Systems or Business Intelligence current term in
use nowadays. After several years in existence, Open Source Business Intelligence tools are mature from
the functional and business model point of view to become a solid option to meet and exceed the business
intelligence needs of an organization. The use of Business Intelligence (BI) tools is popular in industry.
However, the use of open source tools for BI is still quite limited compared to other types of software.
From our analysis, we conclude that the Open Source Business Intelligence tools are growing.
4. References
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[4] Davenport, T. “Competing on analytics”, Harvard business review, pp. 12, 2007.
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[8] Enterprise Open Source Database – Ingres. Retrieved from http://ingres.com/, 2012. [9] Query Processing at Light Speed. available at: http://monetdb.cwi.nl/, 2012.
[10] PostgreSQL: The world’s most advanced open source database. Retrieved from http://postgresql.org/, 2012. [11] MySQL : The world’s most popular open source database. available at: http://mysql.com/, 2012.
[12] Clover.ETL – open source data integration tool. Retrieved from http://cloveretl.org/, 2012.
[13] Pequel ETL Data Transformation Engine. available at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pequel/, 2012. [14] Talend – first provider of open source data integration software. Retrieved from http://talend.com/, 2012.
[15] Pentaho Commercial Open Source Business Intelligence: Kettle Project. available at: http://kettle.pentaho.org/, 2012.
[16] Apatar, Inc. is the developer of a commercial open source data integration product, Retrieved from http://apatar.com/, 2012.
[17] Kupolov, F. Welcome to Scriptella ETL Project. available at: http://scriptella.javaforge.com/, 2012. [18] JDBC Data Transformations. Retrieved from http://www.enhydra.org/tech/octopus/, 2012.
[19] JBIWiki: ETLSE. Retrieved from http://wiki.openesb. java.net/Wiki.jsp?page=ETLSE, 2012. [20] Pentaho Analysis Services: Mondrian Project. available at: http://mondrian.pentaho.org/, 2012.
[21] Palo Open‐Source OLAP for Excel – Multidimensional Database for Budgeting, Forecasting, Planning,
Reporting, MOLAP, Analysis Software ‐ Retrieved from
http://www.jedox.com/en/enterprise‐spreadsheet‐server/excel‐olapserver/ palo‐server.html, 2012.
[22] JPalo – Palo Java World – Business Intelligence Reporting. available at: http://www.jpalo.com/en/products/start_products.html, 2012.
[23] JPivot – Home. Retrieved from http://jpivot.sourceforge.net/, 2012.
[24] Openi.org ‐ Open Source Web Application for OLAP Reporting. available at: http://openi.sourceforge.net/, 2012.
[25] SourceForge.net: REX – waRehouse Explorer. Retrieved from http://sourceforge.net/projects/whex/, 2012. [26] BPM Conseil, available at: http://freeanalysis.org/, 2012.
[27] Introduction to JRubik, Retrieved from http://rubik.sourceforge.net/jrubik/intro.html, 2012. [28] JMagallanes, available at: http://jmagallanes.sourceforge.net/en/, 2012.