SpagoBI in a nutshell

李昌勋

2023-12-01

The unified platform

SpagoBI is a professional Business Intelligence suite entirely developed and released according to the best Free Open Source Software community's practices.

The new (upcoming) SpagoBI 2.0 release offers many main modules:

SpagoBI Server, the already known BI platform with many news
SpagoBI Studio, the new integrated development environment
SpagoBI Meta, the new environment focused on metadata
SpagoBI SDK, the new integration layer to use SpagoBI from external tools
SpagoBI Applications, to collect the vertical analytical models built using SpagoBI

SpagoBI Server

The Analytical Model is the core of the SpagoBI Server and covers the whole range of analytical needs, providing many solutions for each analytical area :

Reports, to show structured data in a pixel-perfect way
OLAP analysis, to navigate through the data
real-time dashboards, to monitor KPIs
data mining processes, to discover hidden information
geo-referenced reporting, to publish data stored in a simple data warehouse over a geographical representation
free inquiry (QbE), to freely build one's own query, export results in data-sheets and generate the first report template
analytical dossiers, to share public and private information before a meeting (i.e. budget discussion, progress made on projects) or to archive thematic collection of documents
office documents, to publish them under the behavioural model control
ETL/EII processes, to collect data from many sources

Based on Open Standards adoption, SpagoBI allows the end-user to compose the most suitable BI platform, also mixing open source and proprietary products in order to maximize the overall ROI, to save investments already done, providing first results quickly with a smooth insertion in pre-existing environments.

The Behavioural Model regulates visibility over documents and data according to the end-users' roles. By means of the Behavioural Model you can:

reduce the required number of analytical documents
code only once the rules of behaviour and visibility
guarantee the uniform growth of the project in time
guarantee the respect of the visibility rules in time, despite of engines or analytical documents addition

The Administration Tools support developers, testers and administrators in their daily work, providing functionalities such as:

scheduler
import/export
audit and monitoring
approval iter
roles synchronization
data source and engine configuration
visibility policy settings

SpagoBI Studio

SpagoBI Studio is the new development environment based on Eclipse IDE. It allows the developer to design and maintain all the analytical documents. Using SpagoBI Studio, the developer can test and deploy the documents into the SpagoBI Server.

SpagoBI Meta

SpagoBI Meta is the new SpagoBI module, specifically focused on metadata management and inquiry. The platform manages technical and business metadata, allowing the user to edit and import them from external tools such as ETL.
Business metadata allows the user to know more about the data under evaluation; technical metadata allows the administrator to know where the data is taken from, to provide automatic documentation or to make impact analyses. SpagoBI Meta is also the basic component for federated inquiry.

SpagoBI SDK

SpagoBI SDK provides some API standards in order to use SpagoBI from an external tool or environment. It also provides some easy tags to directly refer a SpagoBI document from a standard web application.

The Open Source natural choice

SpagoBI goes further than other open source projects, because it provides a unified view or, in other words, a higher level of abstraction, both for data access and for user interaction. It is extensible and may leverage, in the future, other forthcoming new open source projects. For this reason, SpagoBI is a natural choice for users looking for a unified open source platform for business intelligence.