A Survey of Open Source Tools for Business Intelligence

Abstract

The industrial use of open source Business Intelligence (BI) tools is becoming more common, but is still not as widespread as for other types of software. It is therefore of interest to explore which possibilities are available for open source BI and compare the tools. In this survey article, we consider the capabilities of a number of open source tools for BI. In the article, we consider a number of Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) tools, database management systems (DBMSs), On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) servers, and OLAP clients. We find that, unlike the situation a few years ago, there now exist mature and powerful tools in all these categories. However, the functionality still falls somewhat short of that found in commercial tools.