Jaspersoft BI and Multi-Valued Databases

[zlippard]

Hello,

My company has just recently been discussing the use of business analytics / intelligence for our website.  We are a distribution center that caters to hospitals and  we (the IS department) have been asked by our sales reps if there’s anything we can do to provide some analytical tools for our customers.  We’ve been looking for open source projects and I’ve found a few companies out there, including Jaspersoft, that do BI software and I wanted to check out some of your videos online.  

I noticed that Jaspersoft is compatible with many different databases, however, the tricky part is that we use a multi-valued Pick database system called UniData.  Does Jaspersoft have any tools that can automatically plug in to UniData and retrieve what it needs?  Does Jaspersoft take in to account multi-valued databases?

I am thinking that our other option would be to create a data warehouse of some sort or refresh a MySQL database nightly that our future BI tools could access.

Just curious to see if anyone here has dealt with UniData or any multi-valued databases and Jaspersoft together.

Thanks!
-Zac
 

[gdmoreno]

There's currently no tools that allow you to plug in automatically to UniData from JasperReports Server; you would have to build a custom datasource connector, it would essentially be a custom software project. To get an idea of what of a custom datasource project looks like, see  https://code.google.com/p/jaspersoft-bigquery-datasource/ - it's for connecting JasperReports Server to Google BigQuery as a datasource, so a similar idea to what you're trying to accomplish.

The other option you bring up, of building a data warehouse, is another common approach, and not a bad one either - especially if you optimize the data tables for speed (doing data aggregations in there, denormalizing where necessary, etc).

 

[Ching Ice-creaming]

gdmoreno,

I like your comment. Although I don't use BigQuery, jaspersoft-bigquery-datasource is an example of building another data source.

Matt Dahlman has told me that this official Jaspersoft connector will announce soon.

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Ching