Are Open Source Reporting Tools Ready for Primetime?

Z0mb1eman asks: "My company is considering replacing our aging CrystalReports with an open source solution. We are currently doing our research, and the choices seem promising -- JasperReports, Actuate-backed BIRT, and Pentaho, which seems to combine other open-source reporting tools. All have some level of commercial support, but are they ready to replace established solutions like Crystal Reports or even Actuate? Is your company using an Open Source reporting tool, and what have been your experiences with such tools? Are there any other choices we should consider? What should we expect if we make the decision to switch?"

Re:This seems like the first comment

[Anonymous Coward]

The Open Source community, as you call it, is a group of people writing software that they want. If noone who wants open source reporting software is willing to write said software, most likely it will not be written unless they pay someone else to do it. As the original poster mentioned however, there are a few choices at the moment. Don't make the mistake of confusing Slashdot with the Open Source community itself. Slashdot is populated primarily by spectators.

Why are you switching?

[Timothy Chu]

You haven't talked about why you'd want to switch. If something works, why change it?

Depends what you need!

[mikeburke]

Have you identified what your requirements are from a reporting tool, be it open source or commercial? Your definition of 'prime time' is totally dependent on this

- who will be writing the reports (techies, business folks, both)?
- what layout and formatting capabilities are absolutely needed?
- any really big reports? performance may be an issue
- what are the security needs - authentication, visibility, auditing, etc?
- do you need overnight automated report runs?
- what about bursting (automatically splitting a report into sub-reports based on department, product type, whatever)?
- do you need to integrate with custom developed software? what language+platform, etc?

The first point is particularly important - if business staff want to dolly up simple adhoc reports, then this will seriously narrow down the open source field pretty quickly.

Re:This seems like the first comment

[Anonymous Crowhead]

I use open source because it's lowercase free. I keep telling myself I'll contribute someday but it has been almost a decade and I haven't hardly even submitted any bug reports. I think a lot of people talk the talk, but few walk the walk. I'm sure someone will reply saying it's not the case but it is the case with everyone I know who uses open source. The only bug reports I know that anyone (I personally know) sends in is to bioconductor because something produces bad data. They don't care how hard it is to use, how shitty the interfaces can be, they just want the data to be correct. They'll find a work around on their own and if they can't, maybe they'll submit a bug report themselves. They will be using perl, mysql, R, etc because it's lowercase free. The don't care about the politics and just don't have the time or inclination to contribute.

Serious lack of requirements...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ultimately, the suitability of the software depends on your requirements, doesn't it? Do you require source? Do you require a lower cost solution? Do you require support? These are common reasons to evaluate open software replacements for commercial offerings. Chances are you won't find an open source solution that will match the features, functions and support of the commercial offerings available. This, I suspect, will change in time with projects like BIRT http://www.actuate.com/birt [actuate.com] and companies like MARVELit http://www.marvelit.com/ [marvelit.com] and Pentaho http://www.pentaho.com/ [pentaho.com] adding functions, features and support.
Highlight your reporting requirements and I suspect the /.ers can give you a better answer than calling Cognos. :)

Can Someone Help Me Understand???

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone help me understand what this is all about? I thought that Crystal Reports was simply a tool that allowed people to generate their own database queries and design the output pages in the way they want. Frankly I've often wondered why Crystal reports was still relevant as most database applications include the ability to do such custom adhoc queries in the application itself.

But, then people start talking about "Business Intelligence" and all sorts of other stuff that I can't wrap my head around.
What is Business Intelligence precisely?
What sorts of reports are these reporting tools being used to create? I mean, what data is in the reports and where is the data being pulled from?
Why aren't these reports in the applications or at least the ability to create them?
Why would a developer use something like Crystal Reports instead of developing the application to do what it needs to?
Finally, is there anyone here that actually uses business intelligence on a daily basis that can describe what it is and how they use it?