Jaspersoft is targeting Business Intelligence (BI) reporting across a variety of "Big Data" sources where capture, storage, and analytics are especially hard to manage.
With an increasing amount of global information residing in data stores such as Hadoop, NoSQL databases, and massively parallel processing (MPP) analytic databases, the company says that its new release of over a dozen Big Data connectors justifies its claim of being the first and only BI vendor to deliver native reporting for these stores.
Under the banner of its open source Big Data Reporting project, Jaspersoft is keen to emphasize its architectural flexibility, which it says allows its software to be easily embedded or customized and to be deployed on-premises or in a multi-tenant deployment. With this latest product release Jaspersoft is pushing to try and build a foundation for native reporting within any PaaS cloud or hosted integrated development environment (IDE).
Big Data systems are generally recognized as those that provide massive scale out capabilities for large data volumes in the multiple terabyte and petabyte range and are too expensive and unwieldy to manage with traditional systems. There has been a growth in the interest in leveraging this scale of data for BI, but current BI solutions have arguably fallen somewhat short of offering native connectivity and querying for many of these sources — and this is the hook that Jaspersoft is using to position the potential value of its products.
"The continued explosion in data is driving interest in a plethora of new data stores that can handle massive data volumes cost effectively," said Jaspersoft VP of product strategy Karl Van den Bergh. "However, BI vendors to date have focused on providing platform support for a only small subset because they are limited to those with a SQL interface like Hadoop’s Hive project. Jaspersoft’s data agnostic architecture means we are the only BI vendor to provide native support for all three legs of the Big Data stool: Hadoop, NoSQL and MPP analytic databases. This gives our customers ultimate flexibility in terms of being able to report off of any Big Data system they might choose to use."
Jaspersoft native reporting works with the following data stores:
- Hadoop: Jaspersoft supports Hadoop via the Hive SQL interface, reading files via HDFS including the Avro file format, as well as via HBase.
- NoSQL: Jaspersoft offers NoSQL support for the following, broadly recognized major categories of data stores: Key Value Stores, Document Databases, BigTable Clones, Graph Databases, and Data Grid Caching among others. Jaspersoft’s open source projects for reporting against NoSQL technologies include: Cassandra, MongoDB, Riak, HBase, CouchDB, Neo4J, Infinispan, VoltDB and Redis. A non-open source connector is in beta for VMware GemFire.
- MPP Analytic Database: Jaspersoft supports IBM’s Netezza MPP analytic database data warehouse and soon will add commercial analysis support. Vertica and EMC Greenplum are also supported.
