Are Open Source Reporting Tools Ready for Primetime? 57
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?"
This seems like the first comment (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This seems like the first comment (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This seems like the first comment (Score:2)
Re:This seems like the first comment (Score:2, Insightful)
Pentaho? (Score:5, Funny)
pentaho -noun: A group of 5 hos.
Ideally, you need to have a pentaho on each corner you control.
Re:Pentaho? (Score:2)
JasperReports (Score:5, Informative)
We used JasperAssistant [jasperassistant.com] to create the reports, training even non-technical folks on how to create the reports they needed. The reports they made weren't going to win awards, but they got what they wanted and we saved time.
Just be aware that the JasperReports libs do their own thread management (at least it did as of the pre-1.2 release) so be aware of running inside of a J2EE container. We chose to write an asynchronous app that utilized JMS and a java daemon that read the queue and processed the messages, storing the output as a BLOB in a db.
Re:JasperReports (Score:1, Interesting)
You have just perfectly summarized the open source approach.
Re:JasperReports (Score:4, Informative)
The graphing support is not as advanced as that in Crystal, I had to hand code a lot and therefore it would have been impossible for non-programmers/customers to include graphs in reports.
I also found it difficult to replicate the "drill down" feature in Crystal Reports.
Both of these points were extremely important in the replacement solution, and thus Jasper Reports was scrapped, deemed not to be as user friendly, and rich in advanced features as crystal
So, I guess - moral to the story - make sure you have a set of clear features you require and that what you decide meets them.
I use BIRT (Score:5, Informative)
Another good thing is that Actuate has really responsive support and there are lots of examples, tutorials, and online help, etc.
The only real downside so far - installation is a bear (they have promised to fix this soon) and there are still some bugs here and there (though they are responsive via newsgroup, bugzilla, and email.)
Why are you switching? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why are you switching? (Score:2, Informative)
For example we embedded Crystal Reports into one of the applications as an easy way for our product customers to get the data in a nice printable form. A number of our customers had created their own custom reports. While working on the new version of our app we discovered a few bugs in CR that prevent us to do things more flexibly, specifically automate creation of report styles as data complexi
Re:Why are you switching? (Score:5, Informative)
Version 8...that's almost six years old (quite old in terms of reporting technology). Are you developing with Report Designer Component (RDC)? We currently support report modification through something called a RAS API, which might suit your needs. It can be accessed through
I'm not in sales, so I can't tell you how much it would cost compared to open source alternatives. All I can do is tell you that it can be done.
Re:Why are you switching? (Score:5, Interesting)
So to summarize my memory of the costs:
My knowledge of these products is admittedly a bit dated, but that's my recollection. If your management is clueful enough to buy Business Objects Enterprise, the savings in the end more than cover the up-front costs if you have good Business Analysts and good DBAs. Of course, for any of this to matter the reports have to actually be important and useful. If the measurements you're reporting on are BS anyway you should always go with option 1 so that maximum savings can be realized by scuttling the reports.
Re:Why are you switching? (Score:2, Informative)
Well, mostly this is true. I have several reports from CR5 days, that have had small modifications to them over the years, then saved as the newer format. After so many saved as,this will cause the report to not work like the previous version. What I've had to do to get around this was to create a new blank Crystal Report, in my last case in XI, recreate all the db connections, gather all the tables, and recreate all the links. Th
Depends what you need! (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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.
Cognos should be on your short list (Score:5, Informative)
Business Objects seems to have a pretty solid platform these days, but the company tends to use underhanded advertising techniques and make dubious claims in their marketing material. I'm not sure how they are once you are a customer, but I have been unimpressed with their sales pitches to me. Microsoft SQL 2005 has some pretty neat tools bundled. They have really come a long way, and they are fantastic on the back-end or for use internally to the IT department, but they really have nothing in the way of user-facing front-ends that I would consider ready for "prime time". BIRT looks promising, and within a decade I would say it will be fantastic software.
I highly recommend looking at Cognos Series 8. The back-end is a web services based framework and the zero client front ends blows everything else I have seen out of the water. It is simply the best platform I have *ever* used, though it can be a bit pricey. They used to work with you quite a bit on the price; not sure if they still do that with their new named-user-based licensing model. Their support is excellent as well. I was an early adopter of ReportNet, and Cognos flew an engineer down to our site on their dime to troubleshoot a critical bug; we were not a big site, at only 60ish end-users.
Call up a Cognos [cognos.com] rep, they are usually willing to come on-site to do a demo.
Re:Cognos should be on your short list (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cognos should be on your short list (Score:3, Informative)
On the backend, I think Cognos OLAP is just slightly better than MS SQL Analysis Services, but they are roughly equavalent for most uses. On the front-end, however, MS relies on Excel PivotTables, which totally SUCK. Cognos has an entirely web-based OLAP front end that is very intuitive and extremely powerful. This is by far th
Re:Cognos should be on your short list (Score:2)
I suspected as much, but I long ago gave up navigating their website. Every time I go there for information I come away empty handed.
BTW, my "stuck with" was more from the developer side than the end-user side. I actually think it's a pretty nice tool from the end-user perpsective, but it can be a royal bitch to set up right sometimes.
I don't know the exact details of the deal, but we have pretty much unlimited internal usage for Cognos products, since we're really a r
Re:Cognos should be on your short list (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cognos should be on your short list (Score:5, Informative)
They are constantly changing the layouts and deployment locations of their sub-components, and make it nearly impossible to throw a decent proxy front-end on their applet, so that it can fit into a standard (for our company) multi-tiered/multi-firewalled layout.
It used to be that the docroot for all applets was
We've been waiting close to 6 months for a fix to this problem. One they were able to reproduce in their office, 6 months ago. Recently, when asked by us about the status, they stated that "We were finally able to reproduce the problem, and have sent it off to engineering." When we mentioned the fact that that's where we were at 6 months ago - they were like "Oh!"...
Anyway - that's a customer's experience with Business Objects - and to put it mildly.... In my opinion, it sucketh greatly.
Re:Cognos should be on your short list (Score:1)
Re:Cognos should be on your short list (Score:2)
BusinessObjects was "good" software back when no one was in their space about four years ago or more.
Now they truly, "sucketh".
Re:Cognos should be on your short list (Score:2)
We were a 100% ad-hoc-written-by-IT shop originally. When we rolled out OLAP, we intended to apply the 80/20 rule to reporting: OLAP cubes should handle 80% of the information requests, we can spend our time on the remaining 20% as complex ad-hoc reports. This turned out to be pretty
Open Source Spying. (Score:1, Funny)
GNUvore is coming along nicely.
I can say one thing... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I can say one thing... (Score:2)
Parent post: The 'd' and 'k' keys aren't even next to each other.
Yeh, but the 't' and 'h' keys are pretty close to the 'f'...
Ask me in about a month. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm testing Crystal Reports, which seems to be the Oracle of reporting software. Everyone knows about it, there's a large support base, it's quite pricey, ($7.5k for essentially the stuff CleverPath did, only hopefully more intelligent) and if you put it down as a skill on your resume, it's worth something. We don't have very high demands (yet) but I'm reasonably sure that support on-hand (right here, right now) is a requirement, hence I don't think I'll be testing Jasper. The reports really are crucial to the business.
Haven't heard of the other solutions being thrown around; I'll give those a look too.
Report Manager (Score:2, Interesting)
Serious lack of requirements... (Score:2, Insightful)
Jasper Reports is Good. (Score:3, Informative)
From my expeience it was great. The only thing it didn't do for us was Cross Tab reports but that was added after we'd migrated to Crystal. It's been around the longest and has a fairly nice base of third party apps. I had a look at some of the other solutions but at that time they were still in Alpha. It's nice to see that they've made lots of progress.
So personaly I'd recommend checking out Jasper for a day and going from there.
Re:Jasper Reports is Good. (Score:2)
So you're in a good position to understand the training requirements between Jasper and Crystal. Would a 4-day training class in Orlando be enough for a Crystal junkie to tackle Jasper?
Experience (Score:4, Informative)
My current company is in the process of migrating away from Actuate e.Report, which has basically (but unofficially) been EOLed. For example, it'll run under Java 1.5, but every report logs an IOException during generation, and no fix is planned. Performance on large documents (read 1k+ pages) is unusable, and gets significantly worse as the page count increases (not exponentially, but worse than linearly). Oh, and don't plan on your users editing the RTFs it spits out - everything uses absolute positioning within the document, so the page doesn't reflow.
I spent some quality time with BIRT last month, but wasn't terribly impressed. Installation wasn't painless, and their underlying model assumes that your data is a flat, relational table. Our data is hierarchical in nature, and we would have had to either flatten it, or use tons of sub-reports to accomplish our goals. Additionally, the options for output format are pretty limited compared with other solutions.
We ended up setting with Windward Reports, for two main reasons:
1. They assume hierarchical data instead of relational.
2. Their design front end is any RTF editor, and produces editable RTF results (and can still output to HTML, PDF, etc).
Performance with Windward has been an order of magnitude better that e.Report in our worst cases, and they've been quite good about implementing minor new features that we needed.
A couple issues:
1. They're not open source, and are relatively pricey, especially when you're an Application Service Provider.
2. The code that is open (such as thier data adapters) has a strange license, and hasn't been actively cleaned up in a while. Their license requires that you submit any non-company-specific improvements made to a data adapter back to them.
3. Their documentation is not up to date with their latest feature set, so be prepared to look at change logs, or ask questions on their forums. On the other hand, their tech support has been excellent.
We considered a number of other innovative reporting solutions as well. Just make sure that the reporting solution you pick actually meets your data and user's requirements, and don't be afraid to look beyond the "standard" reporting systems if you have non-traditional needs.
More details... (Score:5, Informative)
I kept the submission fairly general, to avoid steering the discussion in any specific direction. Here are a few more details of our situation:
We're a small-to-medium business, and our reporting needs are relatively modest (at the moment - we are steadily growing). I would say no more than 10-20 people need to generate reports. Our software department is also quite small - we have a fair amount of in-house Java expertise, but no one who actually knows Crystal Reports. We're also using an old version, and the reports themselves are out of date. Our choices are to invest in a new version of Crystal, the time for one of us to learn it, and rewriting the reports anyway - or choosing an open-source Java solution and hope for the best. The constraint, as always, is very limited manpower...
Any feedback is welcome - I've seen some very good posts already, I'll have to read all the comments tomorrow in detail.
Thanks!
Re:More details... (Score:2)
Re:More details... (Score:4, Informative)
Segment the people in your company into four groups:
1) Report Consumers - people who consume reports. Generally this is simply the people receiving an email with their Excel report attached.
2) Power Users - these are your business analysts. They are capable of self-servicing their reporting needs to a limited extent, if the interface is simple enough. These are the people who are savvy with Access.
3) Report Authors - people who know your data inside and out, and understand how it applies to the business. In every company I have worked at, this role is inside the IT department. They have the robust reporting tools.
4) Reporting Administrators - people who manage the report server, as well as define the metadata structure. Often this can overlap with a DBA Role. They need to understand about database relationships, cardinality, and also know the data inside and out, but not necessarily how it applies to the business.
Also think about your uses for reporting. In general, reporting is in nature operational (customer called in and needs a copy of an invoice or a current statement of accounts), tactical (we need to generate a customer list for this marketing campaign using certain criteria so we can send a mailing) or stategic (high level executive view of the business).
Hope this helps.
ActiveReports (Score:3, Informative)
are they all written in Java? (Score:2)
Re:are they all written in Java? (Score:1)
Ready for prime time (Score:1)
Now, let's talk about what it really looks like. First "ready for prime time" means very different things to different people. If you're using each of the 72,000 features in Crystal Reports, you will definitely find that a lot of those features aren't available in some of the open source offerings. On the other hand, the open source offerings have some features that Crystal doesn't. But generally, a 22-year old reporting product has
also from a big-company (Score:2)
What we liked about MS SRS was the powerful server backend wi
A few questions you should ask before choosing (Score:1)
Re:A few questions you should ask before choosing (Score:1)
I work for Business Objects. In fact, I am the Product Manager for our new Crystal Reports for Eclipse offering. I attend a number of conferences with my job and often get asked this very question..."Why should I use your product over an Open Source Solutio
Re:A few questions you should ask before choosing (Score:1)
Re:A few questions you should ask before choosing (Score:1)
I really did not want to use this forum to compare specific pricing models between vendors. I was simply trying to emphasize that when comparing two solutions, the end-user should ensure that they are comparing "apples with apples". If a user determines that they will want indemnification and support for their development they should be comparing Crystal Reports with the solution vendors which provide these services for Open Source Software. In this case, I used Actuate's BIRT offering as a
Re:A few questions you should ask before choosing (Score:1)
Isn't this Microsoft's favorite anti-open-source argument? Do you have any (non-Microsoft-generated) data to support that? When you talk to people using, or considering using Eclipse (with or without crystal), do you warn them to carefully consider these "hidden costs", and take
Can Someone Help Me Understand??? (Score:1, Insightful)
But, then people start talking about "Business Intelligence" and all sorts of other stuff that I can't wrap my head around.
W