BI feeds

The cloud will reduce the cost of delivering simple, powerful business intelligence so organizations can finally enjoy pervasive BI.

Could Oracle's Exadata V2 enable a new -- and altogether more ambitious -- approach to enterprise performance management?

What is an agile BI architecture, and how does it fit into an organization's overall BI approach?

Online Social Gaming Company Turns to Visual BI to Delve into Data

I wrote a blog post for opensource.com about the application of open source principles to non-software domains:

http://opensource.com/business/10/6/improving-product-quality-open-source-way

Why data modeling is important in cloud-based BI.

With the recent announcement of three dozen new SQL-MapReduce functions, Aster Data's message is clear: MapReduce is a boon to analytics.

How to build a PowerPivot Competency Center

Why isn't data modeling part of agile development?

The draw of the open source R statistics environment, according to vendors, is cost -- it's simply cheaper than premium offerings.

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I was watching the original Toy Story movie with my kids the other day.  Even watching it today, it’s a surprising movie that still stands up after 15 years.  For the uninitiated, the movie revolves around the misadventures of a toy cowboy named Woody.  In the movie, Woody escapes with Buzz Lightyear from the clutches of Sid, a twisted neighborhood kid who tortures toys in various ways.  All of this is in an attempt to return home, so Woody and Buzz won’t get left behind when their owner moves.

One of the pivotal scenes is when Woody is in Sid’s lair, where he is surrounded by some of Sid’s twisted creations: the head of a pterodactyl on a doll’s body, the body of a strong man and the head of a duck.  You get the jist.  Woody discovers that these “mash ups” are actually friendly, and can help, even though they are an unnatural combination.

With this in mind, below is a quick little combination of Pentaho and Jaspersoft, where Jaspersoft Reports are called from within the Pentaho User Console.  This is admittedly not exactly rocket science, but should spark some thinking of where these disparate platforms can go when they are used collaboratively.

The basic steps to make something like this happen are:

• Make sure you have a working Pentaho server and a Jasperserver installed.
• Then, deploy the jasperserver webapp under the pentaho server’s webapps path to allow the jasperserver to ride along with Pentaho’s Tomcat server.
• Next, within a pentaho solution folder of your choice.  Add a *.url file to the solution that calls the Jasperreport of your choice.  For the URL, add the decorate and jasperserver login parameters like this:

• http://localhost:8080/jasperserver/flow.html?_flowId=viewReportFlow&reportUnit=/organizations/organization_1/StandardReports/ExampleMultiAxis&decorate=no&j_username=superuser&j_password=superuser

• And there you go:

 

 

Yes, there are some limitations here.  It’s passing the plain text user information, and there is no common user model, and sessions are independent.  It also adds some administrative complexity because you now have two different flavors of reporting under the hood, including separate database connections, etc.  There are certainly sexier levels of integration with the jar files/class libraries possible. 

But, simple integration like this can be a quick way to add certain capabilities across platforms, and speaks to the overall coolness that is open source BI.  Yes, you can take the head of a pterodactyl and put it on a doll’s body and you may find that it actually is helpful, and maybe not so scary.

I’ll let you know if I get any more twisted ideas from watching Toy Story 3 this weekend.

Why is agile so important to organizations, and how does an organization get to an agile state?

Informatica Marketplace is similar to Salesforce.com's AppExchange (or Apple's App Store) -- but many unique aspects set it clearly apart.

In a recent Forbes interview Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, somewhat bashes open source: http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/14/google-yahoo-software-technology-cio-network-open-source.html

Ryan makes some good points about the benefits of a multi-tenent architecture, but I feel he’s leaving out some important details.

Did OpSource write their own operating system, servers, middleware, and databases? They would be foolish to.
Did OpSource go with expensive proprietary software for thoses pieces? Probably not, with their business model they’d want to stay away from those license fees – and the OpSource website is RedHat Linux and Apache HTTP.

If they are smart, OpSource will, like all the other SaaS companies, use open source at every opportunity they can. And somehow this is a fatal flaw for open source?

Ryan is just doing a little open source bashing because it’s the thing that scares him the most. If SaaS companies can built multi-tenent apps on an open source base, then so can open source developers. He knows this. He’s just enjoying OpSource’s window of opportunity. But he joins a list of chief executives that have banded together over the years to tell a most amusing story. Bill Gates kicks it off in 2001:

“We think of Linux as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market, but I really don’t think in the commercial market we’ll see it in any significant way.”

2001: He was saying that open source is ok for a hobby, just not for your operating system.
2003: A few years after that, as open source databases started to appear, we heard the CEOs of database companies telling us that open source is ok for your operating system, but not for your database.
2005: Then the executives of middleware companies told us that open source was fine for your operating system and databases, but not for your middleware.
2008: After that we heard application companies telling us that open source is great for your operating system, databases, and middleware, but you don’t to use an open source application.
2010: Now Ryan is telling us that open source is fine for everything including applications, just not multi-tenent applications.

These CEO’s have painted themselves into a very small corner over the years. Looks to me like Ryan is the lastest one holding the brush. The question is who, if anyone, can he pass the brush to when multi-tenent open source applications appear?

The current debate about social media in the context of BI presages its inevitable acceptance, Lyza officials argue. Five years from now, they claim, social BI will be a reality -- and Lyza 2.0 aptly demonstrates its promise.

Thanks to aggressive service enablement and the efforts of DI vendors, another integration paradigm -- call it Integration-as-a-Service -- has emerged.

Far from being a complementary or nonessential data management option, third-party data can become a competitive differentiator.

A consultant offers BI basics for executives, project managers, and developers.

We explore the difference “agile” makes in your data warehouse.

What role does BI architecture play in an agile environment?