Open Source Business Intelligence

João Nuno da Silva Bernardino Martins

Key information

Authors:

João Nuno da Silva Bernardino Martins (João Nuno da Silva Bernardino Martins Severino)

Supervisors:

João Damásio (João Damásio); Andreas Miroslaus Wichert (Andreas Miroslaus Wichert)

Published in

11/03/2008

Abstract

Recently, due to the increasing focus on information as a valuable resource and to the increasing market pressures, organizations are building Business Intelligence (BI) infrastructures to help them achieve ?better" business decisions by making precise and relevant information available to the point of action. The traditional Business Intelligence (BI) architecture requires a database, ?Extract, Transform and Load? (ETL), on-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Reporting tools, therefore the initial licensing cost can easily extend to inhibitive values for many businesses. As an alternative, organizations delegate the information analysis to office productivity software such as spreadsheets or to reporting modules of core transactional applications. However, Open Source Business Intelligence (OSBI) tools such as ETL, OLAP or Reporting tools are available to organizations at very low or no cost,. Since Open Source software is a recent trend, the use of such OSBI tools is not yet common, therefore it is of interest to analyze and evaluate the existing OSBI solutions. The goal of this thesis is to survey the existent open source business intelligence (OSBI) projects, and from a list of selected projects choose the ?best in class?. Additionally to the evaluation of the current open source software offering, a BI system, based on OSBI software, was build to proof that it is possible to implement an end-to-end BI solution using only open source tools and that it could be a viable alternative to the classical commercial software.