Infobright Blog

I guess it’s fair to say that I’m outsourcing this blog post to Roland Bouman and Jos van Dongen who have just published a great new open source software (OSS) business intelligence (BI) book called “Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL”.

I ordered my copy from Amazon.com; I’d bet it’s also available at your favorite bookstore by now, too.  While the OSS BI market has multiple participants - and Infobright has integrated and partnered with most, if not all, of them - this particular book happens to serve as documentation for Pentaho but it can aslo be considered an excellent reference on the topics of BI application development and data warehousing in general. 

It’s clear when an author, or authors, speak from experience.  This paragraph illustrated that to me:

“Over the past decade, open source variants of more and more types of software have become commonly accepted and respected alternatives to their more costly and less flexible proprietary counterparts.  The fact that software is open source is often mistaken for being free of cost, and though that might be true if you only look at the license costs, a BI solution cannot (and never will) be free of cost.  There are costs associated with hardware, implementation, maintenance, training and migration, and if this is all summed up it turns out that licenses make up only a small portion of the total lifecycle cost of any software solution.  Open source, however is much more than a cheaper way of acquiring software.  The fact that the source code is freely available to anyone ensures better code quality since it is more likely that bugs are found when more people have access to the source than just the core developers.  The fact that open source software is built on open standards using standard programming languages (mostly Java) makes it extremely flexible and extensible.  And the fact that most open source software is not tied to a particular operating system extends this flexibility and freedom even further.”

Thanks Roland and Jos!