I'm at a fairly high pain point here with the volume of MIS/reporting
requests and how we (don't) handle them through ad-hoc means.
Currently we have a couple of people who do SQL queries...mostly
using a JSP tool I wrote (kind of the same as Oracle isqlplus which
our vendor removed from our system to keep us from knowing too
much). Anything that isn't doable in a single query is
- pieced together by hand
- somebody writes an adhoc program.
A problem is that "somebody" is now me -- mostly writing stuff
in Groovy/Groovlets/GSP, some JSP stuff, some Jython as well.
We migrated from an in-house system to a 3rd party admin
system (Student records/Finance/HR...) about 18 months ago
and our former Natural/Adabas developers are no longer functioning
programmers. I'm trying to push everybody in the Java (+ JVM
scripting languages a la Groovy) direction, but it's a slow process/steep
learning curve, far removed from Natural/Adabas...
I realise we need help -- primarily on the Reporting/BI front, and
also on the programming front...but I also want to try and stay with
an OSS/web friendly technology strategy here.
Does anybody out there have experience with OSS stuff like Jaspersoft/Jasper
Reports and/or Eclipse/BIRT? I looked at these things long ago and
wasn't convinced they'd help because the focus seemed mainly to be
on presentation/reporting, but the thing that attracts me is the web viewers
that would allow our staff to publish reports on the web easily.
I also looked at OpenReports, which looked promising, but I didn't get
it working...some issues with log4j. And I've seen Pentaho...but that's
about it.
I'm mostly interested in:
1) a decent OSS solution for reporting and/or BI that publishes
stuff on the web easily, or
2) good reasons why I shouldn't look at (1) (like, you have tried to
go this route and have ended up going with a commercial solution
like Cognos...Microsoft Dynamics/Navision/whatever they call it
now...Crystal Reports...Discoverer?)
3) Anybody who does consulting in this line who also could shore
up our not-really-happening Java/Web/OSS friendly strategy.
I'm posting this on a JUG list on the other side of the country -- because
I haven't been able to see any life on Dbnjug and...I just tried again
and the SAJUG website isn't there. CTJUG is the only JUG with any
mail traffic in the country.
--
Soren Aalto
Director: ICT
University of Zululand
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