Jacopo,
I think there are three main user needs:
1) User driven Adhoc Query By Example 'live data' reports
2) Analytics
3) Predefined reports.
Query by Example reports are usually driven by the end application user.
Used adhoc, they allow the user to find out what is currently happening
in the live system. After the initial creation, if they are regularly
run, this means they are becoming a management tool and usually get
converted to a predefined report.
Analytics are usually 'what if?' style reports. They are effectively
the same as QBE, but they are usually run by senior management. They are
usually run against a data warehouse/OLAP cube and allow the comparison
of historical data.
E.g.
how many sales did we have last year?
how many sales last month?
what are the sales currently at?
what is the underlying cause of the sales trends?
Predefined reports are those that have precise layout/data requirements
(e.g. management board reports). They can also have complex links/drill
downs to other reports/data. They are also usually used as a management
tool as the report contents and data rules are usually well defined and
documented for end users.
My experience is in (some) ETL, Analytics (mostly OLAP) and (lots of)
Predefined reporting, but willing to investigate QBE. There are a lot
of good tools out there I would recommend looking at:
- SpagoBI for QBE
- Pentaho Kettle for ETL (don't think we should couple ETL to minilang)
- Pentaho Mondrian/JPivot Analytics (although my experience is Cognos)
- Eclipse BIRT for predefined reports
There are other areas such as dashboards, data mining, etc, but then you
are looking at integrating a complete B.I. infrastructure such as
Pentaho. I think the above list is enough to start with!
Cheers,
Chris
On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 08:15 +0100, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
> Christopher,
>
> still nothing official or concrete, as far as I know.
> I know that Chris Howe did some integration tests with OpenI:
> http://docs.ofbiz.org/x/0AI
>
> I am seriously considering a different approach; while I'm studying the
> book "The Datawarehouse Toolkit"
> (http://ofbiz.apache.org/documents.html), I'm trying to draft out a
> proposal for the implementation of base datawarehousing features in
> OFBiz (a separate set of entities for dimensions, facts and start
> schemas; ETL services based on minilang, tools to manage the dimensions
> tables and synchronization).
> You'll find some of my notes here:
> http://docs.ofbiz.org/x/2QI
> My goal is this: once we have a set of star schemas (facts and
> dimensions) derived from OFBiz entities and based on best practices, and
> the tools to manage the data in them, we could integrate a visual
> reporting tool to run reports against them (or just use, with some
> improvements the form widgets).
> It may seem an ambitious plan, but I think that many of the building
> blocks to complete it are already in the framework, we'll just have to
> improve and fine tune them.
> If you are interested in helping with this we could try to create a work
> group for this...
>
> Jacopo
>
> Christopher Snow wrote:
> > Is there any work going on at the moment to build an ofbiz data
> > warehouse and reporting infrastructure, for example the integration of
> > the Pentaho toolset?
> >
> > Many thanks ...
> >
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>
>
>
