Third party reporting tool

Question

Does anybody know of a reporting tool that will allow me to build reports and charts from my own database?

A client is asking for a report builder that can be used by none technical business-type people. The idea is that we provide a data warehouse with a third party reporting solution built on top of it.

Ideally, this tool would be web based and would allow reports to be persisted/uploaded to a bespoke report management application.

This will ideally integrate with an asp.net environment.

Has anybody come across something like this?

Answer 1

What you are asking for is an ad-hoc reporting solution.

Don't confuse it with Transactional or dashboard solution.

ad-hoc reporting is used by Business/Data Analysts to answer their own questions.

These types of reports have a number of Business objects pre-built in them such as customers, sales and other required objects (Developers construct them ofcourse). What end user does is to drag them into report and apply filter on them to get the answer.

As far as I know, Pentaho offers ad-hoc reporting. Look at the following link: http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/ServerDoc1x/Creating+Reports+using+Adhoc+Reporting

Answer 2

take a look into List Label, too. We've used it in some projects. I've heard somehow that the next version (18) will (this autumn) bring the report designer into all standard browsers. It is very customizable and easy to integrate in other projects.

Answer 3

OBIEE, Microstrategy, Cognos, SAP Business Objects, Microsoft SSAS / BI... and many others. All expensive, and all requiring lots of time to build a structure that then "non-technical" people can use. Have you considered providing excel exports for business users to build pivot tables against? It all depends on how large the client is.

Answer 4

I've been really impressed with FineReport, it's extremely friendly for non-tech user. Users can just drag and drop to create a cool report. Its service program is in the form of jar packages, which can be packaged and deployed on the application server. And HTML generated with finereport can be embedded in the application pages (JSP) at will.