[Toolserver-l] collaborative report generator?

[Finne Boonen]

Jaspersoft is one example, most of their software is open source, some
of the more user friendly parts isn't tho, There's a fairly
interesting sales webex they did a moth or so ago demonstrating what
you can do. I've been meaning to try it out with some of the editdata
for a while.

There's another open source BI company, Pentaho for whom most of their
platform is open source. In both these cases running the software on
data will prolly require some translating steps from the base data
tho.

Finne/henna

On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 3:29 PM, Larry Pieniazek
<lar at miltontrainworks.com> wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2008 07:58:23 +0100
>> From: River Tarnell <river at wikimedia.org>
>> Subject: [Toolserver-l] collaborative report generator?
>> To: toolserver-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> Message-ID: <20080913065821.GO10237 at harmony.local>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-action=pgp-signed
>>
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>>
>> so, it's quite common that people want various kinds of
>> reports on wikis, which are usually generated by a standard
>> SQL query.  in fact, this is so common that we have the
>> "query service" to handle these requests.
>>
>> this isn't the most efficient way to do it, though; a
>> toolserver user has to run the actual query, and if it's
>> meant to be a regular report, they need to crontab it to run
>> as needed.  there's a lot of duplication of effort.
>>
>> instead, what about a collaborative 'report' tool?  i would
>> envisage this working as follows: each query (for example,
>> '100 users with most edits') is described in a file.  the
>> exact way isn't that important, but for the sake of example,
>> the file might look like this:
>>
>>  name=Top 100 editors
>>  # For a slow query, run it once a day from crontab.  Faster
>> queries could be  # done on demand (for example,
>> 'when=immediately'), or cached for a certain  # period of
>> time (for example, 'cache=1h').
>>  when=nightly
>>  query=SELECT ...
>>
>> then for users, there's a web interface where they can select
>> the wiki and the report they want to run.  for queries that
>> need parameters (e.g. those that report on a particular
>> article), they could select the article (preferably with a
>> nice ajaxy input box).  then the SQL might look like:
>>
>>  SELECT ... WHERE page_namespace=<NAMESPACE> AND page_title=<TITLE>
>>
>> <NAMESPACE> and <TITLE> would be filled in by the report generator.
>>
>> the web interface would display the result of the query in a
>> nice, easy-to-read table (and probably with some kind of XML
>> or CSV export feature).
>> any project developer would be able to add new queries, which
>> users could request in JIRA.
>>
>> as the project would have many developers, i envisage it
>> running on the stable server.  if people are actually
>> interested in doing this, i'd be willing to create at least
>> the basic framework (hopefully the interface would have
>> several maintainers who would add nice features).
>>
>> opinions?
>>
>>       - river.
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> This sounds like a really neat and useful idea. Building it sounds like fun
> for its own sake, too. But when I read it I was struck by the thought that
> the specification and generation of reports is something that many
> commercial tools do. (In my real job, one of the things that the software I
> work with does is feed data warehouses that you can run Business Objects,
> Cognos, Crystal Reports, and the like against).
>
> Perhaps it might be worth doing an investigation to see if there is a
> freeware alternative to one of those commercial tools that could be
> deployed? (let me apologise in advance if this was done already and I missed
> it!) And if there is none, consider if this project could be built in a way
> that results in reusable components to make such a thing?
>
> Here is an example:
>
> http://www.jaspersoft.com/downloads.html
>
> I have not evaluated this to see if it's truly "free" enough, or a technical
> fit, or whatever, I just found it with a quick search, but it suggests that
> free report generators/designers might be out there if we look.
>
> Here is another one:
>
> http://www.freereporting.com/
>
> Same caveats... (in particular this one is not open source... so presumably
> a non starter. it's just an example to consider.)
>
> Now of course, we may not want to give the ability to create reports of
> whatever sort, schedule them, and have them run, consuming who knows how
> much resource, etc to "just anyone"... maybe we'd want to see some sort of a
> "design/review/proposal/approval" process in place before a report went live
> (but we'd want that in any case I'm guessing, even with something done
> ourselves)
>
> I hope this is helpful. I will say that being able to generate reports that
> I design would be exceedingly useful functionality regardless of how it is
> realised.
>
> Larry Pieniazek
> Hobby mail: Lar at Miltontrainworks dot com
>
>
>
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