Difference between eazyBi report generation tool and power report

[Amrita Saha]

I want to work on an advanced report generation tool. After searching through i got this 2 tools and am confused about which one will be a better tool. Please help!

[Pablo Beltran]

Things have changed lately with new players in the JIRA advanced reporting field. The BIRT capabilities are clearly superior to any Marketplace vendor's custom solution. Period.

Another common mistake is thinking that BIRT is for relational database based reports only. False. It supports REST as any other 3rd data source accessible via Java.

BIRT  is a recognized industry-standard tool used by 3.5 millions of developers and +200 millions customers according to the data provided by OpenText (the company that acquired Birt recently) with a extremely powerful plugin for Eclipse in order to design advanced reports.

Any Birt drawback? Yes. It had to run on a different application server than JIRA. This drawback has nicely been resolved by the 

Birt Reports for JIRA

Now, it is possible to run Birt on JIRA and benefit from run both applications in the same JIRA context (logged in user's session). Today, there are no drawbacks. Only advantages. The Birt Reports for JIRA add-on is a direct and neat BIRT instance without any modification just running right inside JIRA.

Of course, trends are difficult to modify and whereas other Marketplace vendor's proprietary solutions have been available for years ago, the new players have come to the Markeplace few weeks ago and therefore they are not popular among JIRA customers and Experts yet. For sure, it will change progressively.

Another brilliant solution related to BIrt is the the following add-on:

SQL for JIRA 

It wrappers the JIRA Java API with a standard SQL API. Hence, it is no longer necessary to access to the JIRA legacy database to make powerful SQL based reports. And both add-ons (Birt Reports and SQL for JIRA) have been improved to work together. 

 New and interesting times are coming to JIRA advanced reporting 

birt_reports_for_fira_eclipse.png

[Pablo Beltran]

You might want to see the BIRT reports for JIRA in action. I leave here a link to a 1 minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxpBYtbS_Xc

[Martin Cleaver]

Video unavailable.

[Rob Horan]

Pablo - we need a new link. I'm not exactly being sold by the unhappy face in the screen 

[Rob Horan]

Thank you Pablo!  Very much appreciated!

[JagdishN]

Hi Pablo,  Birt Viewer Gadget on JIra does not load data from Agile schema, is there any config that I have to do

[JagdishN]

Hi Pablo,  I am using Birt Report for JIRA along with SQL for Jira,   The addon errors on select statement that use Agile schema.  Am I missing something in the setup.

[Pablo Beltran]

The setup of both plugins are trivial as they do not require any further configuration. So a single click to install they from the Marketplace is enough for fully working.

Keep in mind please that SQL for JIRA wraps the JIRA REST API and therefore you have to follow the same approach required by the JIRA API.... in other words the JIRA Software/Agile REST API is board-based. therefore, you have to select the board then then join the rest of the Agile tables by using a board id.

[JagdishN]

Thanks Pablo followed the steps it works well with reports from PUBLIC schema.  Quite simple to use.  

I tried a simple query on AGILE schema like, ' Select id, name from Agile.boards'.  It worked well on SQL for JIRA console.  But on 'SQL for Jira' gadget it popped a JDBCException.  Probably I must have broken something.  If I can get this working, I will be demonstrating this add-on to a wider group.

[Pablo Beltran]

It's a bug as other users have reported the same behavior. I guess it will be fixed within one or two weeks along with a new SQL for JIRA major release (3.0) with a lot of awesome new reporting features. Something killer is in the way and coming soon, two new plugins to make reports with a totally different approach and even new ones will be released in the medium term covering all the wide reporting spectrum: relational reports, business intelligence, pixel perfect documents and bringing more industry-standards protocols and open tools to JIRA .

[JagdishN]

Thanks again,  Is there a way that it can be communicated to your project team about this error, so that I can be sure it is fixed.  I will be glad to provide any information or logs that is required.  If there is any patch that can be provided, it would be great.  What is confusing me is that, why it worked the first time.

[Pablo Beltran]

It's a good idea. Please create an issue in the JIRA instance. Thanks.

[JagdishN]

Created an issue BIRT-6.  Thanks

[Raimonds Simanovskis]

As eazyBI core developer of course I will say that eazyBI is a better tool :) Please try it out and if you need any help then contact eazyBI support.

There are some customers who have switched from PowerReport to eazyBI - see latest review on eazyBI Marketplace page (BIRT is reporting tool that is used by PowerReport).

PowerReport requires external Eclipse based BIRT designer tool for creation of reports. eazyBI includes web based report creation tool (which is the same as report viewer) which can be used from any web browser. As a result eazyBI report creation is accessible to more users.

eazyBI is available both as installable JIRA plugin as well as hosted add-on for JIRA OnDemand (in case if you will use JIRA OnDemand in future you will be able to use the same reports).

eazyBI is also more actively developed and maintained and also has more extensive documentation and examples.

[Rob Horan]

Can these reports be generated by non-admin JIRA users easily?  Heavy emphasis on "easily"

[Pablo Beltran]

eazyBi and BIRT are very different and they are intended for different fields. BIRT is likely the best open tool for Reporting in the World, whereas eazyBI is based on Pentaho's Mondrian, a embeddable Java library for Business Intelligence (cubes, dimensions, measures) which claims to be the easiest Business Intelligence tool in the World, but except the Eazybi team none has corroborated it with a comparative of eazyBI vs the rest of the Business Intelligence available in the market.

BUT regardless of  the discussion about what of them is better, why do JIRA users have to choose among them? it is possible use them on JIRA (Pentaho Mondrian for Analytics Business Intelligence as well BIRT for reporting) under the same architecture. SQL for JIRA unifies them on JIRA and brings lot of industry-standards and open tools. We have analyzed the market and we chose the leader open source tools for reporting (BIRT) and Business Intelligence (Pentaho Mondrian) among others coming soon.

Stay tuned at the Codegeist 2016 and vote for the award winning Analytics Business Intelligence Tool for JIRA . 

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