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Firms release open-source business-intelligence tools

Start-up Greenplum partners with two companies to create an open-source stack of data analysis tools and a database.

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Martin LaMonica Former Staff writer, CNET News
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer covering green tech and cutting-edge technologies. He joined CNET in 2002 to cover enterprise IT and Web development and was previously executive editor of IT publication InfoWorld.
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Martin LaMonica
Three business-intelligence vendors have released a package designed as an open-source alternative to proprietary database offerings.

Greenplum, JasperSoft and Kinetic Networks unveiled on Wednesday a software and hardware bundle that includes data analysis tools and an early version of Greenplum's specialized business-intelligence database. It is available through the Greenplum-sponsored Bizgres Project.

The collection is built around Greenplum's Bizgres, a version of the PostgreSQL open-source database designed specifically for building large-scale analysis databases.

Greenplum also released on Wednesday version 0.7 of Bizgres at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore.

Open-source databases are having an impact on the relational database marketplace overall, particularly for low-end offerings, according to analysts. PostgreSQL and MySQL are examples of two general-purpose databases that are widely used.

With the bundle, Greenplum and its partners intend to bite away at the dollars spent on business intelligence, an area that has seen relatively steady spending over the past few years.

JasperSoft offers an open-source reporting tool, and Kinetic Networks provides consulting services and data-moving tools.

Another open-source business-intelligence offering is available through the Eclipse Foundation. It's called Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) and was started by business-intelligence vendor Actuate. The project released version 1.0 in June.