I have developed a web application driven by a mysql database that stores information about users, site usage, photo uploads (its a photo based site) etc. I have multiple databases storing data for different aspects of the site. I want to be able to produce reports for some of the questions I will have about how the site is growing and how it is being used. For example, how many new users have uploaded over a certain number of photos this month.
What tools are available to analyse databases – i have been using a trial version of microsoft access and exporting each of the database as an xml file and importing to access, where I created the relationships and used the query wizard to generate some queries and reports. These are the activities I want to do and they produced the reports I want to have. I also want to be able to run queries across databases…
What other tools to people use for this sort of task with mysql databases? Is there any good advice / training materials about the workflow for creating such reports and managing this activity over time – eg should I take weekly exports of databases and run the queries to generate the reports?
What are people’s experiences of this type of task?
all advice, input welcome.
Welcome to business intelligence, the art of making information out of data.
A usual architecture is Source –> ETL –> Data warehouse –> Reporting tools
ETL : extract transform load (today you are copying your databases but some free tools can help you change that : CloverETL, Talend, etc…)
Data warehouse : this is the place where you put your data and prepare it to be easily used in reports
Reporting tools: many free tools exist today such as BIRT, JasperReports, etc… but I strongly recommend QlikView, the personal version is free (if you don’t need to share your results), it’s a very easy tool to use.