Sybase Analytics

Hello and Happy Holidays!

The holidays are generous this year, as Sybase introduces BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tool) into its toolkit bag of goodies.  WorkSpace is Sybase’s integrated tooling offering, that includes modeling, design and development tools, all hosted within the Eclipse open source framework. 

Now you have another useful tool in WorkSpace with BIRT.  BIRT is a reporting system, with data access, data transformation, and presentation features that integrates with your Java/J2EE application to produce compelling reports.  BIRT can access data from Sybase’s enterprise caliber servers – ASE for OLTP, and Sybase IQ for analytics, as well as any data sources with standard Java interfaces.  BIRT has two main components: a report designer based on Eclipse, and a runtime component that you can add to your application server.

If you have WorkSpace Data Analytics or WorkSpace Data Analytics Enterprise licensing, the BIRT report designer is automatically installed when you install Sybase WorkSpace 2.5. You can also download and install it from the Eclipse Web site.

With BIRT, you can add a rich variety of reports to your application (all pictures shown below are from the Eclipse BIRT web site: http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/examples/solution/):

The basic content of a report is textual data: lists and crosstabs.  Lists of data can be sorted, grouped and aggregated with totals, averages and other summaries.  Crosstabs show data in two dimensions, such as sales per quarter or hits per web page:

You can add charts – graphical representations of data in the form of pie charts, line and bar charts (among others):

And it is easy to create form letters and other formal documents, such as invoices, with BIRT:

All of the reporting features described above can be combined into sophisticated “compound reports” that really bring information to life and drive your message home.

So, add WorkSpace with BIRT to your gift list this year, and have a very merry and BI-eautiful holiday season!

Until later,

Courtney Claussen