Open Source Analytics

The OLAP Report is one of the oldest and most authoritative independent research resources for organizations buying and implementing OLAP applications. It was started by Nigel Pendse in October 1994, as an authoritative and independent voice seeking to clear the hype and misinformation flooding the field. (more…)

On Friday we released DecisionStudio Professional - a comprehensive and free desktop BI Platform that gives you all the tools needed for analytics under a single package licensed under GNU Public License (GPL).

DecisionStudio Professional (DSP) is an advanced graphical data mining, reporting, modeling, and analysis environment built on top of the best-of-breed open source projects. Some of these include:
— Optimized MySQL database as data warehouse platform
— SQL Workbench (MySQL Query Browser and DBDesigner) for Data Analysts
— R environment for statistical analysis and modeling
— iReport Reporting GUI and JasperReport reporting library
— Python with Boa Constructor IDE for application and GUI development

DecisionStudio Professional is the only end-to-end open source analytics platform that provides comprehensive capabilities to each role. Data Analysts get to store, process, and publish data on a standard MySQL platform; Reporting Analysts would like iReport and the integration with Office tools; and Modelers would love the excellent R Environment. It also includes Python along with a drag-n-drop GUI building environment for analytics Application Developers.

You can find out more about DecisionStudio Professional at decisionstudio.com, and can download your copy at Sourceforge.net. Click here to download the product brochure (PDF).

Go ahead, it’s completely free and will always stay so.

In the last post (OLAP Reporting on Open Source Software - I) we spoke about Mondrian, an open-source OLAP server.

In this post we would be setting up OLAP reporting for a hypothetical retailer called FoodMart that sells various grocery products in a chain of stores across US, Canada, and Mexico.
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OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) reporting systems provide what is commonly known as “slice-and-dice” functionality to non-technical end users. Users are able to see ad-hoc reports and charts to answer ad-hoc questions they may want answered. Another commonly used name is “drill-down reporting” on “OLAP cubes”. In essence this is similar to the Excel based Pivot reports, only that OLAP systems can do the same thing on massive amounts of data.

The OLAP Reporting revolves around two simple concepts: Dimensions, and Measures.
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