Dear OFBiz user, It pleases me to be able to announce that as of today the first release of the drop-in replacement plugin for the 'BI' component in the ofbiz-plugins repository has become available via Github (see [1]). I have called this drop-in replacement the '*odwh*' plugin.
About 2 years ago I recognised that the 'BI' plugin in the OFBIZ-plugins repository has a huge potential for OFBiz users in that it could populate a data warehouse on a regular basis with the latest data from the OFBiz transaction database, and thus enabling key users to gain a better insight in their business domains of the organisation (using OFBiz) without a complex and arduous process to get the data from the OFBiz transactions database into the data warehouse. However, while working to get the improvements into the code base (see [2] and [3]), and documenting it (see [4]) I noticed that, based on comments/reactions provided by (some of) the privileged contributors in the OFBiz community, it would be a long stretch before this would become available in the codebase. And that, I found, would be a pity. Not only regarding the effort already spent on improving the original component, or regarding creating another opportunity to collaborate on improving OFBiz not coming to fruition. But more importantly: because you would not get it anywhere soon to leverage your investment in using OFBiz. Thus I decided to make this effort directly available to you as a drop-in and replacement plugin for the BI component in the ofbiz-plugins repository. *Not a BI solution* Though the *odwh* plugin has a rudimentary report builder to show that there is data in the data warehouse (through the population of dimension and fact tables), the *odwh* plugin is not intended to be a BI solution. There are already enough (open-source) solutions out there that will cater to any kind of preference a BI oriented user (data analyst, etc.) may have. A good open-source solution you may want to consider if you're considering making BI reports available to your C*X level of your organisation is Apache Superset. *What is in the package* The package contains following dimension entities (tables in your database): - date and time dimensions - Account dimension - Carrier dimension - Country and Currency dimensions - Customer dimension (some could/would call this the 'vendor' dimension) - Employee dimension - Facility Dimension (some could/would call this the 'warehouse' dimension) - PosTerminal dimension - Organisation dimension (regarding internal organisations) - Product dimension - Project and ProjectTask dimensions - Store dimension - SalesChannel and SalesPromo dimensions - Supplier dimension (some could/would call this the 'vendor' dimension The package also contains following fact entities (tables in your database): - InventoryItemFact - PurchaseInvoiceItemFact - PurchaseOrderItemFact - SalesInvoiceItemFact - SalesOrderItemFact And following (rudimentary) star schema entities (view-entities) to work with the integrated report builder: - InventoryItemFact - PurchaseInvoiceItemStarSchema - PurchaseOrderItemStarSchema - SalesInvoiceItemStarSchema - SalesOrderItemStarSchema Plus all the services (and configurations) required to: 1. initialise the data warehouse 2. update (manually) the data warehouse (for testing purposes) 3. On a regular/scheduled basis (through configuration setting(s)) populate the data warehouse with the latest changes from the OFBiz transactions database. By default the DWH population is executed through a scheduled job (to be executed at 2 AM every day: see the dataset - SystemProperty with systemPropertyValue="HOUR_02" ) leveraging off-business and off-maintenance hours. This job will be visible in the Jobs overview in the admin application. I hope you will give this *odwh* plugin a try-out (fork it, or download the latest release), and if you have any questions do not hesitate to contact me. Implementation instructions is available at [5]. If you experience any issues with the plugin, please register them at [6] 1. https://github.com/ORRTIZ/odwh/releases/tag/g-1.0.0 2. https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20OFBIZ%20AND%20component%20%3D%20bi%20%20AND%20resolution%20%3D%20Unresolved%20ORDER%20BY%20updatedDate%20DESC 3. [3] https://github.com/apache/ofbiz-plugins/pull/11 4. [4] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Business+Intelligence 5. https://github.com/ORRTIZ/odwh/wiki/How-to-implement 6. https://github.com/ORRTIZ/odwh/issues PS The *odwh* plugin is intended for releases of OFBiz utilising the Gradle build system. Are you working with a release utilising the Ant build system and you would want to have something similar, please let me know. Met vriendelijke groet, Pierre Smits *Proud* *contributor** of* Apache OFBiz <https://ofbiz.apache.org/> since 2008 (without privileges) ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com> OFBiz based solutions & services OEM - The OFBiz Extensions Marketplace1 http://oem.ofbizci.net/oci-2/ 1 not affiliated to (and not endorsed by) the OFBiz project
