Open Source Business Intelligence Tools: A Review

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1 Open Source Business Intelligence Tools: A Review Amid Khatibi Bardsiri 1 Seyyed Mohsen Hashemi 2 1 Bardsir 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 Amid Khatibi Bardsiri et.al

2 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 MonetDB PostgreSQL MySQL Clover.ETL ETL Pequel ETL Perl Talend ETL Kettle ETL Apatar ETL 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]. 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]. An object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Microsoft 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]. 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]. 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]. 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]. An open source software vendor that provides data integration, data management, enterprise application integration and big data software and solutions [14]. 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]. An open source ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) and data integration software application. Apatar s user and customer Amid Khatibi Bardsiri et.al

3 Scriptella ETL Octopus ETL ETL Integrator Mondrian Palo JPalo Client and Client JPivot OpenI REX FreeAnalysis ETL servers servers Linux, and 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]. An open source ETL and script execution tool written in. 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]. A simple -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]. 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]. An open source (online analytical processing) server, written in. 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]. A memory resident multidimensional (online analytical processing () or multidimensional online analytical processing (M)) database server and typically used as a business intelligence tool for controlling and budgeting purposes with spreadsheet software acting as the user interface [21]. 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]. A JSP custom tag library that renders an table and let users perform typical navigations like slice and dice, drill down and roll up. It uses Mondrian as its Server. JPivot also supports XMLA data-source access [23]. 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]. 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]. A complete java (Eclipse RCP) and 2.0 (Dojo) application that provide functions against Pentaho Mondrian Server and other MDX/XMLA compliant cubes data-sources such as Microsoft Analysis or Hyperion [26]. JRubik is an client developed in /Swing and based on Amid Khatibi Bardsiri et.al

4 JRubik JMagallanes Olap & Reports JPivot project components. The queries could be issued using MDX language [27]. An open source end user application for and Dynamic Reports written in /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 [1] Alter, S. A work system view of DSS in its fourth decade, Decision Support Systems, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp , [2] Lönnqvist, A. and Pirttimäki, V. The measurement of business intelligence, Information Systems Management, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp , [3] Power, D.J. A Brief History of Decision Support Systems, version 4.1, November 10, [4] Davenport, T. Competing on analytics, Harvard business review, pp. 12, [5] Solomon, N. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Vol.13, pp , [6] Hostmann, B. Business intelligence trends, with Gartner analyst, available at: [7] Olszak, C. M., and Ziemba, E. Business intelligence systems in the holistic infrastructure development supporting decision-making in organizations. Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge and Management, Vol. 1, pp , [8] Enterprise Open Source Database Ingres. Retrieved from [9] Query Processing at Light Speed. available at: [10] PostgreSQL: The world s most advanced open source database. Retrieved from [11] MySQL : The world s most popular open source database. available at: [12] Clover.ETL open source data integration tool. Retrieved from [13] Pequel ETL Data Transformation Engine. available at: [14] Talend first provider of open source data integration software. Retrieved from Amid Khatibi Bardsiri et.al

5 [15] Pentaho Commercial Open Source Business Intelligence: Kettle Project. available at: [16] Apatar, Inc. is the developer of a commercial open source data integration product, Retrieved from [17] Kupolov, F. Welcome to Scriptella ETL Project. available at: [18] JDBC Data Transformations. Retrieved from [19] JBIWiki: ETLSE. Retrieved from java.net/wiki.jsp?page=etlse, [20] Pentaho Analysis Services: Mondrian Project. available at: [21] Palo Open Source for Excel Multidimensional Database for Budgeting, Forecasting, Planning, Reporting, M, Analysis Software Retrieved from spreadsheet server/excel olapserver/ palo server.html, [22] JPalo Palo World Business Intelligence Reporting. available at: [23] JPivot Home. Retrieved from [24] Openi.org Open Source Application for Reporting. available at: [25] SourceForge.net: REX warehouse Explorer. Retrieved from [26] BPM Conseil, available at: [27] Introduction to JRubik, Retrieved from [28] JMagallanes, available at: Amid Khatibi Bardsiri et.al