About business intelligence open source

It has been a long time since the last post. Currently I'm relocating in London and all the things to do keep me busy.

In London I'm involved on the design and development of a visual statistical enviroment with R-Project as backend. Really exciting project, hope it'll have a great success becoming an Open Source tool for complex statistical and Data Mining analysis. 

The commissioner is one of the most important college in London, this is all I can say for the moment. Hope to start to write about tutorials and Business Intelligence relatic topics as soon as possible.

Cheers
Roberto
 

Here is a usefull and complete guide on performances tuning for Microsft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services.

SQL Server 2008 for Analysis performance guide

Covered arguments are:

• OLAP cube design
• Datawarehouse performance settings
• MDX query optimization

For a more generic guide on configuring and working with SQL Sever for Analysis Services here is another interesting paper:

SQL Sever 2008 for Analysis operations guide

Oracle plans to include in its Big Data Appliance solution a complete set of Open Soure products for data management and data analysis.

The most interesting part is the inclusion of Apache Hadoop and R project, a professional Open Source solution for data analysis and statistics.

Here is a more complete article: http://www.r-bloggers.com/oracles-big-data-appliance-to-include-r/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RBloggers+%28R+bloggers%29

This tutorial explaing how to create simple web service providers and consumers using Open Source Talend ESB components.

http://talendforge.org/tutorials/tutorial.php?language=english&idTuto=94

Data mining analysis and Business Intelligence techiniques applied to Twitter's data reveals many compormental patterns and what people thinks and needs during the day.

This article of Economist http://www.economist.com/node/21531025 lists some usefull resources and interesting applications.

For example some companies provides Twitter analysis to learn how people feels during the day and what people tinkgs about some arguments or products.

Here is an interesting video tutorial on how to build a dashboard in minutes using SpagoBI Open Source Business Intelligence suite.
For an on-line demo of SpagoBI click on http://spagobi.eng.it/SpagoBI

An interesting list of most usefull tools and solutions to create new ideas http://creatingminds.org/tools/tools_ideation.htm

R-project, a professional and powerfull statistical software, can be used as Data Mining tool (Text Mining and Social Network Analysis) to discover relations in mailing lists.

This paper covers an example on how to use R project to analyze authors and content relations on big mailing lists http://journal.r-project.org/archive/2011-1/RJournal_2011-1_Bohn~et~al.pdf

Talend, a fast growing company focusend on Data Integration, Data Quality and Data Management solutions, is moving fast on the emerging Data Management market. 

While data abundance is on a growing trend, companies needs to mantaing quality in information retriveral, reduce archiviation costs and syncronize different ERP systems and local data bases. This complex task is done often by writing custom software procedures by hand, but this approach is time expensive and difficult to mantain.

Nowadays Data Management tools are the cheaper and preferred way to achive data quality, data syncronization (ETL) and lower archiviation costs facing big amount of data.

For example here are some nice screenshots of some top-selling (Open Source) software http://www.talend.com/press-kits/press-kits.php.

A common feature in reporting is the capability to link a report's field (or chart area) to another report. The second report can show related data or a detailed view of the selected value.

For example suppose you have a "Top 10 customers" report and you want to click on a customer name to show all its related invoices. In Pentaho Report Designer this task is quite easy.

First you must define a parameter on the target report, this parameter will be used to filter query results. For example in the target Invoices report we define a parameter named CustomerNo (right click on Parameters -> Add parameter..).

This parameter will be used in the query editor to filter all invoices by CustomerNo:

Now it's time to define a new link on the first report (Top 10 Customers) to open the related Invoices. In the first report simply right click on the field you want to link (for example Customer) and select Hyperlink..