As a symptom of developing applications I have dealt with a lot of reporting and BI tools. From Cognos through to Crystal and others. But last night I finally spun up Pentaho.

Wow. I was impressed.

I grabbed their Reporting Evaluation tool and had it up and running in no time. I hooked up a MySQL datasource and produce reports almost immediately (well if you discount a few distractions and user errors).

A good thing about this, is that I can now slot Pentaho into my next project.