We should really consider to add (or integrate) in OFBiz some facilities
for datawarehousing.
I don't know how Pentaho works, and I've still not researched for
similar tools but I think before looking outside we should set up
something in OFBiz for this: I'm thinking of a new entity group (e.g.
org.ofbiz.datawarehouse) to store denormalized/customized entities that
will be the basis of the new reports (these entities could be stored in
a different db); triggers or scheduled services could fill the entities;
we should design the whole thing so that the layout (and supporting
services) of the entities will be easy to customize, and we could
include in SVN the basic layout.
I guess that this would allow the creation of (simple) reports (using
the widgets?) based on complex analysis and data manipulation (done by
the scheduled services/triggers) but also more complex ones using an
external reporting tool.
And about simpler reports (but this is a bit off topic here) I strongly
believe that we should all use the screen/form widgets and just forget
about JasperReport etc... because with them it is already possible to
create very quickly simple/nice/easy-to-customize reports (in html/pdf/xml).
Jacopo
Chris Howe wrote:
David, others,
A couple of weeks ago there was some talk about
business intelligence in OFBiz. Like others, I
started looking at Pentaho. Reading through their
documentation the only real difference between the
basics of Pentaho and OFBiz is the integration of an
OLAP Engine and a structured way (meaning specifically
for BI reporting) to put the components together. Was
there any other ideas/technology that you see as
needed to put together to get that caliber of insight
out of OFBiz?
