Free OLAP software for Postgres databas

On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 1:45 PM, Michal Szymanski<dyrex@poczta.onet.pl> wrote:

Hi,
I'm looking for free software that provide OLAP functionality (or more
general BI) for data that are stored in Postgres database. I've found
Pentaho and Jasper  but both sollution are configured for MySQL. Can
you recomend something that works with postgres?

I've used Pentaho with pgsql and it worked pretty well. I'm pretty
sure jasper as well can work with pgsql.

Scott Marlowe wrote:

On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 1:45 PM, Michal Szymanski<dyrex@poczta.onet.pl> wrote:

Hi,
I'm looking for free software that provide OLAP functionality (or more
general BI) for data that are stored in Postgres database. I've found
Pentaho and Jasper but both sollution are configured for MySQL. Can
you recomend something that works with postgres?

I've used Pentaho with pgsql and it worked pretty well. I'm pretty
sure jasper as well can work with pgsql.

It can -- just use JDBC

Joe

I've used Pentaho with pgsql and it worked pretty well.  I'm pretty
sure jasper as well can work with pgsql.

Where can I find information how to install Pentaho on Postgres? Do
you use free edition?

Regards
Michal Szymanski

On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Michal Szymanski<dyrex@poczta.onet.pl> wrote:

I've used Pentaho with pgsql and it worked pretty well.  I'm pretty
sure jasper as well can work with pgsql.

Where can  I find information how to install Pentaho on Postgres? Do
you use free edition?

We used the free version, and the docs that came with it covered jdbc
connection. It's been a couple of years since I was part of that
project, so the memories aren't real clear. Just remember hooking it
up to pgsql was the easy part.

On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 02:04:13PM -0700, Michal Szymanski wrote:

I've used Pentaho with pgsql and it worked pretty well.  I'm pretty
sure jasper as well can work with pgsql.

Where can I find information how to install Pentaho on Postgres? Do
you use free edition?

We also both the free and enterprise versions, and both work with PostgreSQL.
Note that there are two different things you might be talking about, here:

1) PostgreSQL contains your data warehouse, or pieces thereof.
2) PostgreSQL contains the Pentaho repository

The first is easy; simply configure data sources pointed at the PostgreSQL
database. Note that the JDBC drivers that ship with Pentaho are, in my
experience, of inconsistent version, and you might want to update them to the
latest available for your PostgreSQL and Java versions.

The second is more difficult, but also very possible. There are PostgreSQL
scripts in Pentaho's biserver/data/postgresql directory. These create the
necessary databases. Though they're poorly written, IMO, they'll give you a
good idea what you really need to create. The hardest bit is editing all the
configuration files for the various bits of the Java stack (spring, hibernate,
acegi, pentaho...). It's best to find instructions for using MySQL as the
repository, and substitute "PostgreSQL" for "MySQL". One possible such
reference is
http://www.prashantraju.com/pentaho/guides/biserver-2.0-final/biserver2.0-local-final.pdf

- Josh / eggyknap

The first is easy; simply configure data sources pointed at the PostgreSQL
database. Note that the JDBC drivers that ship with Pentaho are, in my
experience, of inconsistent version, and you might want to update them to the
latest available for your PostgreSQL and Java versions.

In my experience you don't want to upgrade the jars that come with
Pentaho. If it is not the versions that they come with the chances are
that things will not work. The JDBC driver might be upgradeable, I
believe we downloaded that by ourselves.

Also we had a much better experience with Jasper (free version) then
Pentaho (free version).

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 09:02:30AM +0300, Sim Zacks wrote:

The first is easy; simply configure data sources pointed at the PostgreSQL
database. Note that the JDBC drivers that ship with Pentaho are, in my
experience, of inconsistent version, and you might want to update them to the
latest available for your PostgreSQL and Java versions.

In my experience you don't want to upgrade the jars that come with
Pentaho. If it is not the versions that they come with the chances are
that things will not work. The JDBC driver might be upgradeable, I
believe we downloaded that by ourselves.

We've not had problems upgrading the JDBC drivers (or indeed installing them,
as IIRC, some components just haven't had a PostgreSQL driver in the default
installation). Your Mileage May Vary. We haven't touched any other libraries
that ship with Pentaho, which I tend to think is a wise decision on our part
:)

Also we had a much better experience with Jasper (free version) then
Pentaho (free version).

When we tried to decide between the two, we took both out for brief test
drives. They seemed almost functionally equivalent, and there were no major
advantages or deficiencies we found to indicate one over the other. But that's
a decision made with regard only to those features we cared about.

- Josh / eggyknap