The Open Source World and the Business Intelligence

1. Background

In February of 1998 Todd Anderson, Chris Petterson, Jon “Maddog” Hall, Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman and Eric Raymond gathered and created the “Open Source” term (or FLOSS Free/Libre and Open Source Software) (OSI,2010).

In 1985 Richard Stallman established the Free Software Foundation, a non-profit organization with the purpose of eliminating constraints on copy, redistribution, understanding and modifications at programmes and computers. One of his great contributions was the GNU operating system and the GNU manifest, published in 1985 at Dr. Dobbs’s Journal of Software Tools, considered, by many persons, as the main philosophical source in free software.

As these ideas became popular, people and companies began to develop software and release it at the internet, free of charge. People could use, modify or distribute the software, starting what today is called Free Software Community.

According to the Free Software Foundation at “The Free Software Definition” article:

“The Free software is a matter of the user has the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, modify and improve the software. Precisely, it means that the users have the four basic freedoms:

• The freedom to run a program, for any reason (freedom 0)

• The freedom to study how the program works, changing it according to a purpose (freedom 1). The access to the source code is a pre-condition.

• The freedom to redistribute copies in order to help others (freedom 2)

• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified version (freedom 3). So, all the community can be benefited from your changings. The access to the source code is a pre-condition. (GNU 2010).

2. Linux

Undoubtedly, Linux is the most known word in the world for people that do not know about free software, open source or any word associated with open source movement. Any computer user can say that Linux is a free operating system; nevertheless, few of them associate it with the open source movement.

In 1991 a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, who was born in 28th of December of 1969 in the city of Helsinquia, started independently the project that would change the world and would provide a great visibility to the open source community. He was the creator Of GNU/Linux kernel. The objective was to create an operating system similar to Unix and in 1991, when the project was launched, Linus sent a message to Usenet saying that he willing to share his source code with other programmers in order to improve the system. The first official version of Linux kernel, 0.02 was launched at 5th of October of 1991.

3. The Open Source world and the Business Intelligence

Since the main concepts were explained, it is important to present the main open source projects applied to create a consistent business intelligence solution:

• Linux: Free operating system, stable, robust, reliable, frequently used as a BI Server. Some Linux distributions: SUSE, Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu and Fedora (UNIX, 2010).

• MySQL and PostgreSQL: these databases are often used on a BI project, both of them have a community version that can be successfully used as a data warehouse.

• Pentaho BI Suite: a set of BI tools developed with Java technology that can create OLAP cubes, customised reports, ETL processes and provide a web portal based on a web container (PENTAHO, 2010)

• Squirrel: SQL universal client, developed in Java, useful to create SQL queries and run various database through JDBC (SQUIRREL, 2010)

• Apache Tomcat: Java container, used on web-based applications. The Pentaho BI Server application uses Tomcat as its standard server (TOMCAT, 2010).

• Java: created by Sun Mycrosystems, Java allows the creation of applications for desktop, web and cell phones. Some of its advantages: portability, reliability, freedom, open source and Sun Microsystems’ credibility (SUN, 2010).

• Eclipse: It is an IDE useful to create dashboards.

• Jasper: It is Pentaho BI suite’s competitor. At the open source world, the JasperReports products in addition with iReports are extremely used (JASPER, 2010).

However the knowledge about open source tools is relevant, this book is focused on Pentaho and the development of a Business Intelligence project using it. The next chapter introduces our main and powerful tool to create a BI project.