Using open source tools for data warehousing and reporting
Increasingly, IT shops are being asked to contribute value back to their law schools by providing data analysis and "business intelligence" tools and services. Historically, this has been done in Excel. We're trying to move beyond that at Emory, and so we've been exploring the use of open source tools to respond to these requests. There is a new generation of reasonably easy-to-use cross-platform tools, mostly written in Java, that can help with some of these needs.
I'll be talking about using open-source software to access and report on data from institutional systems such as PeopleSoft, Symplicity, and ACES2. The focus will be on the Pentaho BI Suite Community Edition (http://community.pentaho.com/). I'll walk through using the Pentaho Kettle tool to extract, transform, and load data from Excel and flat files into MySQL data tables. Then we'll discuss MySQL GUI-based access via SQL Power*Architect (http://www.sqlpower.ca/page/architect) and data clean-up with Data Cleaner (http://datacleaner.eobjects.org/). Finally, we'll go through report-writing using the Pentaho Report Designer tool.
