Ruby for BI and DW
Ruby is gaining ground as a programming language, but is far from the most popular choice, especially in the corporate consulting world. However, it has a loyal following for a reason: hackability. It is open source, supported by a dedicated developer community, and it requires little overhead to do powerful things. When resources are tight and time is constrained, a hackable solution has great appeal. It is also great for building prototypes, for prototypes that could end up as production code (think Visual Basic), or for applications that will require frequent changes. Many popular web applications (Basecamp, for example) are built with Ruby, which speaks to both the power and robustness of the language, the libraries and the Ruby on Rails framework.
I came across this blog post which suggests a three Ruby based tools for data warehousing and reporting:
- ActiveWarehouse - Based on the Ruby on Rails framework, ActiveWarehouse simplifies creating the data warehouse dimension and fact tables.
- ActiveWarehouse ETL - The ETL component of ActiveWarehouse that loads the data.
- Ruport - A collection of Ruby tools to facilitate building reports.
I don’t know how maintainable a Ruby DW/BI solution is, but it would be worthy of consideration if you need a cheap and hackable custom solution (and you like hacking Ruby, of course). I would certainly want to build the business rules in the database (probably a good practice anyways), with stored procedures and views, so that if another BI solution was introduced, either as a replacement or as a complement, you would not have to start again from scratch.
