Commercial and Open Source Business Intelligence Platforms for Big Data Warehousing

Abstract

A big data warehouse enables the analysis of large amounts of information that typically comes from the organization's transactional systems (OLTP). However, today's data warehouse systems do not have the capacity to handle the massive amount of data that is currently produced. Business intelligence (BI) is a collection of decision support technologies that enable executives, managers, and analysts to make better and faster decisions. Organizations must make good use of business intelligence platforms to quickly acquire desirable information from the huge volume of data to reduce the time and increase the efficiency of decision-making processes. In this chapter, the authors present a comparative analysis of commercial and open source BI tools capabilities, in order to aid organizations in the selection process of the most suitable BI platform. They also evaluated and compared six major open source BI platforms: Actuate, Jaspersoft, Jedox/Palo, Pentaho, SpagoBI, and Vanilla; and six major commercial BI platforms: IBM Cognos, Microsoft BI, MicroStrategy, Oracle BI, SAP BI, and SAS BI & Analytics.