My professional and my personal life has kept me very busy since my last post, and I thought I’d never blog again. A significant portion of my busy schedule has been devoted to exploring new Open Source realms, lines of codes which could help my processes get streamlined and entire company more organized. Even though 90% of my proposals are turned down in the hope of something better (read costly proprietary software), I don’t feel like stopping. Maybe I am selfish, but I guess till the time I don’t manage to hurt someone, it is alright.
Apart from my other normal duties, I also have the responsibility of handling the Business Intelligence function in the organization. This function started off as a 2 member MIS team with MS Excel being the only tool at their disposal (And this would be true for almost all small to medium sized organizations). I somehow don’t like Excel for some obvious reasons (Though its a great tool) and have been trying get away from the spreadsheet business “spread” all over the place.
My primary goals:
1. A centralized repository for all my data
2. Ability to create a reporting layer with some canned reports without much of a manual coding work
3. Dashboarding
4. A possible web based interface for my users with customized home pages
5. Analysis of business data
All these requirements though seem wonderful, but is a daunting challenge to be even anywhere near to them (Specially if you are a small company with almost no money to spend on pricey software).
I have been trying various things which I thought might click (Without really thinking of how to do them eventually), like for example a test deployment of Palo technology (Open source OLAP). Problem with PALO is that it helps in my first goal of a central data repository, but everything else is so difficult (Specially for someone with very less coding skills). Though OLAP provides a very nice functionality of drill down analysis, everything seems a waste if I can’t create reports on top of it (Without much of a coding that is). So I had to backtrack.
Then somehow I received an invitation for a webinar on Open Source BI technologies. I attended and came to know about two major players in the Open Source BI market –
Pentaho BI Suite
JasperSoft
After months of research and feasibility analysis, I came to the conclusion that Pentaho is best suited for my needs for some specific reasons –
1. A combined suite with reporting, dashboarding, analysis and other modules built in (Including Mondrian OLAP and Kettle ETL).
2. Its increasing work and documentation with mysql (Makes me smile as I have the basic understanding of mysql)
3. GUI report building which almost anyone can learn (With some basic knowledge of query language)
So I finally made the decision of moving my entire BI function onto Pentaho (And I have only started). As I stated in my first post, I am going to keep my promise of giving back to the Open Source community by documenting each and every step of my battle towards automating my spreadsheet based BI function. I have already some initial inroads, and would discuss in my next posts. If you think you are one like me, please support this project and keep me motivated (A comment on this post is what I consider as a “support”).
Gaurav Rai's Blog 