Open Source Solutions

'Tis been longer than intended, but we finally have the technology, time and resources to continue with our Open Source Solutions Decision Support System Study Guide (OSS DSS SG).

First, I want to thank SQLstream for allowing us to use SQLstream as a part of our solution. As mentioned in our "First DSS Study Guide" post, we were hoping to add a real-time component to our DSS. SQLstream is not open source, and not readily available for download. It is however, a co-founder and core contributer to the open source Eigenbase Project, and has incorporated Eigenbase technology into its product. So, what is SQLstream? To quote their web site, "SQLstream enables executives to make strategic decisions based on current data, in flight, from multiple, diverse sources". And that is why we are so interested in having SQLstream as a part of our DSS technology stack: to have the capability to capture and manipulate data as it is being generated.

Today, there are two very important classes of technologies that should belong to any DSS: data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI). What actually comprises these technologies is still a matter of debate. To me, they are quite interrelated and provide the following capabilities.

• The means of getting data from one or more sources to one or more target storage & analysis systems. Regardless of the details for the source(s) and the target(s), the traditional means in data warehousing is Extract from the source(s), Transform for consistency & correctness, and Load into the target(s), that is, ETL. Other means, such as using data services within a services oriented architecture (SOA) either using provider-consumer contracts & Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) or representational state transfer (ReST) are also possible.
• Active storage over the long term of historic and near-current data. Active storage as opposed to static storage, such as a tape archive. This storage should be optimized for reporting and analysis through both its logical and physical data models, and through the database architecture and technologies implemented. Today we're seeing an amazing surge of data storage and management innovation, with column-store relational database management systems (RDBMS), map-reduce (M-R), key-value stores (KVS) and more, especially hybrids of one or several of old and new technologies. The innovation is coming so thick and fast, that the terminology is even more confused than in the rest of the BI world. NoSQL has become a popular term for all non-RDBMS, and even some RDBMS like column-store. But even here, what once meant No Structured Query Language now is often defined as Not only Structured Query Language, as if SQL was the only way to create an RDBMS (can someone say Progress and its proprietary 4GL).
• Tools for reporting including gathering the data, performing calculations, graphing, or perhaps more accurately, charting, formating and disseminating.
• Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) also known as "slice and dice", generally allowing forms of multi-dimensional or pivot analysis. Simply put, there are three underlying concepts for OLAP: the cube (a.k.a. hypercube, multi-dimensional database [MDDB] or OLAP engine), the measures (facts) & dimensions, and aggregation. OLAP provides much more flexibility than reporting, though the two often work hand-in-hand, especially for ad-hoc reporting and analysis.
• Data Mining, including machine learning and the ability to discover correlations among disparate data sets.

For our purposes, an important question is whether or not there are open source, or at least open source based, solutions for all of these capabilities. The answer is yes. As a matter of fact, there are three complete open source BI Suites [there were four, but the first, written in PERL, the Bee Project from the Czech Republic, is no longer being updated]. Here's a brief overview of SpagoBI, JasperSoft, and Pentaho.

We'll be using Pentaho, but you can use any of the these, or any combination of the OSS projects that are used by these BI Suites, or pick and choose from the more than 60 projects in our OSS Linkblog, as shown in the sidebar to this blog. All of the OSS BI Suites have many more features than shown in the simple table above. For example, SpagoBI has good tools for geographic & location services. Also, JasperSoft Professional and Enterprise Editions have many features than their Community Edition, such as Ad Hoc Reporting and Dashboards. Pentaho has a different Analyzer in their Enterprise Edition than either jPivot or PAT, Pentaho Analyzer, based upon the SaaS ClearView from the now-defunct LucidEra, as well as ease-of-use tools such as an OLAP schæma designer, and enterprise class security and administration tools.

Data warehousing using general purpose RDBMS systems such as Oracle, EnterpriseDB, PostrgeSQL or MySQL, are gradually giving way to analytic database management system (ADBMS), or, as we mentioned above, the catch-all NoSQL data storage systems, or even hybrid systems. For example, Oracle recently introduced hybrid column-row store features, and Aster Data has a column-store Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) DBMS|map-reduce hybrid [updated 20100616 per comment from Seth Grimes]. Pentaho supports Hadoop, as well as traditional general purpose RDBMS and column-store ADMBS. In the open source world, there are two columnar storage engines for MySQL, Infobright and Calpont InfiniDB, as well as one column-store ADBMS purpose built for BI, LucidDB. We'll be using LucidDB, and just for fun, may throw some data into Hadoop.

In addition, a modern DSS needs two more primary capabilities. Predictives, sometimes called predictive intelligence or predictive analytics (PA), which is the ability to go beyond inference and trend analysis, assigning a probability, with associated confidence, or likelihood of an event occurring in the future, and full Statistical Analysis, which includes determining the probability density or distribution function that best describes the data. Of course, there are OSS projects for these as well, such as The R Project, the Apache Common Math libraries, and other GNU projects that can be found in our Linkblog.

For statistical analysis and predictives, we'll be using the open source R statistical language and the open standard predictive model markup language (PMML), both of which are also supported by Pentaho.

We have all of these OSS projects installed on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine. The trick will be to get them all working together. The magic will be in modeling and analyzing the data to support good decisions. There are several areas of decision making that we're considering as examples. One is fairly prosaic, one is very interesting and far-reaching, and the others are somewhat in between.

1. A fairly simple example would be to take our blog statistics, a real-time stream using SQLstream's Twitter API, and run experiments to determine whether or not, and possibly how, Twitter affects traffic to and interaction with our blogs. Possibly, we could get to the point where we can predict how our use of Twitter will affect our blog.
2. A much more far-reaching idea was presented by Ken Winnick to me, via Twitter, and has created an on-going Twitter conversation and hashtag, #BPgulfDB. Let's take crowd sourced, government, and other publicly available data about the recent oilspill in the Gulf of Mexico, and analyze it.
3. Another idea is to take historical home utility usage plus current smart meter usage data, and create a real-time dashboard, and even predictives, for reducing and managing energy usage.
4. We also have the opportunity of using public data to enhance reporting and analytics for small, rural and research hospitals.

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