The age is of that of information. No Doubt. But, with increasing size of data and the redundancy, it is not difficult to get lost into the vastness of the data ocean. How often have you experienced that you sit in front of your computer to search on a specific topic and find yourselves wandering for hours, losing your focus. Very often isn't it.
Google made it easy to find the data, making the search engine efficient. Today, people have become use to using search engine. Somehow, we all have become lazy to even remember the site's name, cause we have confidence in search engine. So what is the NEXT step in this information revolution. Analysis??
Well, I am not trying to brag about my profession, but surely when the size of information is so large, you need some one to analyse them and ...and what?? And report them to the end user.
Ultimately, it is the defined information that we need. Thus, it is not surprising to find many reporting tools available here and there. But very often do you find a Web Reporting Portal and that also based upon the Open Software Philosophy. One such tool that I have come across is OpenI.
Talking about reporting tools, they are based upon different database system or architecture, depending upon the nature and size of data. The common database system are MySQL, Oracle, PostGreSQL, SQL etc. But, reporting is done not directly from the Database server, there is a need for few layers between them so that the data is processed to the required form.
In OpenI, this layer is the OLAP and RDBMS deployed on any J2EE server. Technically, OpenI is the integration of a powerful java based tools like JPivot, JFree Chart, Mondrian and Jasper Report.
It provides an easy way of connecting a processed data in the form of OLAP to the end-user in form of Graphs and Charts with the click of button and query processor. Its fun to use it, especially when it is web based. Soon information processor will be flooding the market today and this is inevitable.
With the demand of Intelligent Data in the market, it won't be wrong to tell that this is the age of Information 2.0 as my friend, here has mentioned.