Business Intelligence Tools for Small Companies: A Guide to Free and Low-Cost Solutions

Learn how to transition from Excel-based business intelligence (BI) analysis to enterprise stacks of open-source BI tools. Select and implement the best free and freemium open-source BI tools for your company’s needs and design, implement, and integrate BI automation across the full stack using agile methodologies.

Business Intelligence Tools for Small Companies provides hands-on demonstrations of open-source tools suitable for the BI requirements of small businesses. The authors draw on their deep experience as BI consultants, developers, and administrators to guide you through the extract-transform-load/data warehousing (ETL/DWH) sequence of extracting data from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) database freely available on the Internet, transforming the data, manipulating them, and loading them into a relational database.

The authors demonstrate how to extract, report, and dashboard key performance indicators (KPIs) in a visually appealing format from the relational database management system (RDBMS). They model the selection and implementation of free and freemium tools such as Pentaho Data Integrator and Talend for ELT, Oracle XE and MySQL/MariaDB for RDBMS, and Qliksense, Power BI, and MicroStrategy Desktop for reporting. This richly illustrated guide models the deployment of a small company BI stack on an inexpensive cloud platform such as AWS.

What You'll Learn

You will learn how to manage, integrate, and automate the processes of BI by selecting and implementing tools to:

• Implement and manage the business intelligence/data warehousing (BI/DWH) infrastructure
• Extract data from any enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool
• Process and integrate BI data using open-source extract-transform-load (ETL) tools
• Query, report, and analyze BI data using open-source visualization and dashboard tools
• Use a MOLAP tool to define next year's budget, integrating real data with target scenarios
• Deploy BI solutions and big data experiments inexpensively on cloud platforms

Who This Book Is For

Engineers, DBAs, analysts, consultants, and managers at small companies with limited resources but whose BI requirements have outgrown the limitations of Excel spreadsheets; personnel in mid-sized companies with established BI systems who are exploring technological updates and more cost-efficient solutions

About the Authors

Albert Nogués is BI Project Manager/BI Architect/BI Developer for Technology2Client, a consultancy to the BI and DWH teams at Danone. He also manages BI projects for Betvictor, a sports gaming company, and designs APIs and interfaces for market pricing services and traders. He has deep knowledge of the full BI stack and holds Oracle certifications in OCA, OCP, and Performance Tuning. Albert received multiple MS degrees in Computer Science and ICT from the Universitat de Catalunya and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Juan Valladares is the founder and CEO of Best in BI Solutions, a business intelligence consultancy whose clients include T2C, everis, and other consulting companies. Juan collaborates with end customers such as Zurich, Danone, or Mondelez. A telecommunications engineer by training, Juan has 15 years of experience in business intelligence, data modeling, and BI system administration. He is specialized and certified in Microstrategy. He teaches courses in BI tools, high-concurrency platform management, and ETL and BI processes development. He received his MBA from the Universidad de la Rioja and his engineering degree in telecommunications from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.