Pentaho has shipped a new version of its Data Integration tool that is included as part of its Pentaho BI suite. Version 2.5 of the software bumps up greater scalability through an improved bulk loading interface for the MySQL database, better ETL job design and error handling capabilities, and a new drag-and-drop user interface that improves developer productivity.
Data Integration 2.5 also supports Apache’s virtual file system to deliver a consistent view of content from multiple file systems – local, remote, zip archive or HTTP server.
Pentaho acquired the underlying technology of Data Integration from the open source Kettle ETL project in September 2006.
The Orlando, Florida-based company has also bought several other open source projects to round out its Bi suite including the Weka data mining software, Mondrian OLAP engine and the JFreeReport Java reporting library.
Meanwhile San Francisco-based JasperSoft has overhauled its own BI suite providing professional functionality for the suite’s core reporting, analysis and data integration modules.
The Professional edition adds four new professional products — JasperReports Pro, JasperReports Developer Pro, JasperStudio Pro and JasperETL Pro.
JasperSoft has extended support for operating systems (including Fedora Enterprise Linux, Debian Linux, Microsoft Vista, Solaris and HP-UX) and databases (PostgreSQL, Enterprise DB, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Ingres).
The professional editions also add new web-based ad hoc reporting tools and revised Ajax drag-and-drop interfaces. They also come with commercial licenses, indemnification, advanced support levels, a controlled release cycle and expanded language support for Japanese, German, French and Italian.
The first is JasperETL Professional edition is really an enterprise-grade update of JasperSoft’s open source ETL software for creating operational data stores and data marts that now includes a shared multi-developer repository and the ability to automatically create Perl or Java data ETL jobs. The product is based on open source ETL software developed by France-based Talend, with whom JasperSoft struck a licensing agreement with in January this year.
The JasperReports Professional edition meanwhile builds on JasperSoft’s open source Java reporting library and graphical report design software adding ad hoc querying of non-SQL sources and a revamped WYSWYG interface for crosstabs, filtering and sorting of reports.
The capabilities of JasperAnalysis, an OLAP component, have also been strengthened considerably, with a new workbench tool for managing OLAP metadata and graphical OLAP schema and MDX query builders.
JasperSoft called version 2 of its BI Suite a significant product line expansion that it claims will make the software more accessible to a broader set of business users than before.
The company said that many of the new features added in the release have been driven through its recently set-up Jasperforge.org BI community, which now boasts over 30,000 registered developers and hosts over 150 active projects.
JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite Professional Edition is licensed on a per CPU basis. JasperReports Developer Edition is licensed on a per developer basis. Licensing is also available for independent software vendors (ISVs) who want to embed JasperSoft products.
The underlying open source code for all the software is freely downloadable for the Jasperforge.org website.
JasperSoft now boast more than two million downloads worldwide and more than 6,000 commercial customers in 81 countries.
