{"id":5924,"date":"2014-08-19T15:18:47","date_gmt":"2014-08-19T19:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.iri.com\/blog\/?p=5924"},"modified":"2026-02-23T14:34:57","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T19:34:57","slug":"birt-integration-iri-workbench","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iri.com\/blog\/business-intelligence\/birt-integration-iri-workbench\/","title":{"rendered":"Affordable BIRT Acceleration via CoSort"},"content":{"rendered":"

Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT) is a\u00a0free, open source, visual reporting platform\u00a0for Eclipse, and\u00a0the commercial foundation for rich\u00a0analytic\u00a0extensions available from Actuate. More than 2 million people around the world use BIRT. However, as with most\u00a0BI tools, data visualization, not\u00a0data integration,\u00a0is BIRT’s strength.<\/p>\n

Actuate suggests the use of Hadoop, in-memory databases, or other new ‘big data<\/a>‘ technologies to prepare data for BIRT analytics. But those\u00a0are complex, costly roads to travel, and often\u00a0overkill.<\/p>\n

Fortunately,\u00a0BIRT now also works\u00a0directly with the SortCL program engine in\u00a0IRI CoSort<\/a>\u00a0(and thus\u00a0IRI Voracity<\/a>) in the same Eclipse GUI<\/a> for single-pass\u00a0data preparation and presentation.\u00a0Using\u00a0the Eclipse\u00a0Open Data Access (ODA) protocol, BIRT users can specify an “IRI Data Source” to rapidly produce reports from fit-for-purpose data sets that CoSort produces.<\/p>\n

CoSort is the traditional big data engine, performing and combining bulk data transformations in Unix and Windows file systems for 4- or\u00a05-figure perpetual\u00a0use license fees.<\/p>\n

According to Athena Solutions founder Rick Sherman,<\/p>\n

… the CoSort SortCL program<\/a> prepares (or “franchises”) data in disparate file and database sources for BI by transforming, cleansing, masking, and re-formatting the data. \u00a0SortCL jobs are described in simple text files that use centralized metadata, and are supported by\u00a0job design and management facilities\u00a0in\u00a0the IRI Workbench GUI, built on Eclipse\u2122.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

SortCL can\u00a0produce CSV\u00a0files that BIRT can rapidly ingest as a data source. Moreover, SortCL can feed output records\u00a0directly in memory to industry-driven BIRT templates via\u00a0ODA.<\/p>\n

In the\u00a0dynamic workflow paradigm, both the metadata and the output data from SortCL jobs are provided seamlessly to BIRT templates for use at reporting time.\u00a0Data integration occurs during\u00a0visualization, so custom views from\u00a0big data can materialize much faster.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The process of building a BIRT report with SortCL-prepared data is straightforward, and described in the article, “Using IRI Data Sources in BIRT<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT) is a\u00a0free, open source, visual reporting platform\u00a0for Eclipse, and\u00a0the commercial foundation for rich\u00a0analytic\u00a0extensions available from Actuate. More than 2 million people around the world use BIRT. However, as with most\u00a0BI tools, data visualization, not\u00a0data integration,\u00a0is BIRT’s strength. Actuate suggests the use of Hadoop, in-memory databases, or other new ‘big data‘<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":11636,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[108,32,91,2255],"tags":[175,636,25,110,629,359,635,229,519,129,546,489,631],"class_list":["post-5924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-big-data-2","category-business-intelligence","category-iri-workbench","category-archived-articles","tag-actuate","tag-athena-solutions","tag-big-data","tag-birt","tag-business-intelligence-reporting-tool","tag-data-preparation","tag-data-presentation","tag-data-visualization","tag-database","tag-eclipse-gui","tag-iri-cosort","tag-metadata","tag-oda"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAffordable BIRT Acceleration via CoSort - IRI<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.iri.com\/blog\/business-intelligence\/birt-integration-iri-workbench\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Affordable BIRT Acceleration via CoSort\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT) is a\u00a0free, open source, visual reporting platform\u00a0for Eclipse, and\u00a0the commercial foundation for rich\u00a0analytic\u00a0extensions available from Actuate. 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