SapgoBI Lesson 1: Introduction and Installation
Downloading and installing SpagoBI.
Download SpagoBI at the URL http://forge.ow2.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=204. There are two components that we will need for this course:
- SpagoBI Server - This is the actual business intelligence platform that offers all the core and analytical functionalities. It is also where we will be hosting all reports created using BIRT. Click on All-In-One-SpagoBI-3.3-01242012.zip to download the SpagoBI Server as illustrated below.
- SpagoBI Studio - We will need the SpagoBI studio to create BIRT reports. BIRT is an eclipse based business intelligence and reporting tool and the acronyms stand for Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools. Download SpagoBI Studio by clicking on SpagoBIStudio_3.3_win_20120120.zip as illustrated below.
In addition to the two pieces of software above, you will need to install java development kit and ensure that the java bin directory is in your computers PATH variable.
Configuring SpagoBI.
I downloaded and kept my all my software on the folder C:BI so the full path to my SpagoBI server is C:BIAll-In-One-SpagoBI-3.0-apache-tomcat-6.0.18-06212011. As you can see from the path above, I am using version 3.0 but you should download the latest version if it is available. Navigate to C:BIAll-In-One-SpagoBI-3.0-apache-tomcat-6.0.18-06212011apache-tomcat-6.0.18in and double click on the file startup.bat to start SpagoBI server. This takes relatively longer to start on windows as opposed to linux.
From the startup output, we can see that SpagoBI uses the tomcat server as a default and therefore you can easily change the IP address of the server and the port from the tomcat configuration file in the location C:BIAll-In-One-SpagoBI-3.0-apache-tomcat-6.0.18-06212011apache-tomcat-6.0.18confserver.xml
Note: You might get the error “SEVERE: Catalina.start LifecycleException: Protocol handler initialization failed: java.net.BindExcept ion: Address already in use: JVM_Bind<null>:8080” if the port is already used by another server.
Once the server is up, navigate to the URL http://localhost:8080/SpagoBI and login using the user biadmin and password biadmin.
Note: By default, there are various other users e.g bitest, bimodel, bidev, biuser with password being the same as the username but we will ignore these other users at this point.
Now that we have logged in into SpagoBI, we can test a few objects that come embedded with SpagoBI before we start creating our own.
Steps:
- Login to SpagoBI as user biadmin and password biadmin.
- Navigate to Root -> Examples -> Report_BIRT and click on Report with image.
Below image shows how a BIRT report looks like. We will be creating BIRT reports in this book.
- Navigate to Root -> Examples -> OLAP_Jpivot_Mondrian and click on Simple OLAP.
Olap allows you to view data in various dimensions like in the example above, you can view information drinks in so many ways by just collapsing the product and Region as shown below. We will learn how to create our own OLAP objects using a step by step example in this book. We can see that there were 55 units of Washington Diet Cola ordered in Mexico Central. This allows you to view a very large amount of information easily by slicing and dicing!
4. Navigate to Root -> Examples -> Charts – Highcharts. The High charts engine is one of the best chart engine available. The charts are very informative and beautiful to look at. Click on any chart to see for yourself. We will be learning how to use this wonderful engine in this book.