Ask HN:how to get BI reports from mysql

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3517401

by RuchitGarg • 14 years ago

4 7 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

looking for some free tools/service, which are easy to use, to get dynamic reports out of mysql installation on ISP.

mindcrime• 14 years ago

http://www.eclipse.org/birt/

http://jasperforge.org/projects/jasperreports

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/

thibaut_barrere2• 14 years ago

For one of my customers, I have set up an ETL using ActiveWarehouse-ETL [1] in Ruby, which transforms the production data into a MySQL dimensional structure (facts joined with dimensions).

From there their non-technical users use plain Excel (their tool of choice) and an ODBC bridge to create reports as they wish.

See http://blog.logeek.fr/2008/1/19/a-beginner-s-guide-to-datawa... for interesting links I kept around, too.

[1] https://github.com/activewarehouse/activewarehouse-etl

chris_dcosta2• 14 years ago

This is only a very basic dimensional model. It will not handle more sophisticated Business Intelligence reporting where serious comparitive KPIs are required.

You would have to hand build seriously comprehensive scripts to handle issues such as time dependency of attributes, hierarchies, navigational outliers.

If all that your business understands by BI are lists of data from the source or simple aggregation of current data, this is fine.

If they wish to analysis the historical data accounting for scenarios where the business process has changed over time this won't do.

thibaut_barrere2• 14 years ago

Commenting a bit late, but: the model is indeed simple, but that's on purpose. It's actually the simplest possible model that fulfill the customer needs.

This system does indeed currently handle hierarchies, slowly-changing dimensions, and provides far more than lists of data, including some rather complicated KPIs.

In short: it fits the customer needs. Not to nitpick, but I've seen many people going with more complicated solutions (including SSIS and the rest of the MS suite) only to find out it was a major pita; that's why I'm advocating simplicity :)

Just curious: which kind of technical solutions have you been using and are happy with?

revorad• 14 years ago

http://chart.io/

RuchitGarg• 14 years ago

thanks, looking for free options at this point

Ask HN:how to get BI reports from mysql

Related Stories