[viandante]

Well, at work I use Cognos. But it is clumsy and it forces you in its paradigms. Instead, when I dream or code (I am learning to code, I am a finance guy), I am making demos for things that should provide a better way to explore your data: http://andemo.ep.io/.

Basically, my issue with corporate analytics is that there are no apis. Everything has to be accessed from its software. SAP data stays in SAP or goes in some 90' data warehause system.

Another issue is that data is stored in multiple versions in different files across many users locations (Excel files madness). This drives people nuts and I can't understand why don't we already have a BaseCamp for finance and analytics.

A third issue is that people are mixing data and views. This makes usually data in, i.e. in spreadsheets, completelly unuseful for other analysis, you basically have to copy and paste data from the fancy templates to a clean file to use it. Views should be web based too, not to enter the 'update this file periodically manually' hell.

Once you have apis, it's a matter of building apps to consume them and eventually to make snapshots of your data (you don't want to recalculate monthly billings at every page request). Your specific need, for example, could be solved with a fancy web based pivot table (the sort you have in spreadsheets) that accesses json data...

So, finally, if you find or start an interesing project of this type, let me know as I am interested to join!

[dakoller]

RE. issue 2) and 3) I just thought that data cubes an open, but standardized format could help - not only in the financial area: I found RDF data cubes ( http://publishing-statistical-data.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/... ) perhaps being a part of the solution there, with the value add that you could easily connect different data source using their semantics.

(liked the "basecamp for analytics" point)

[viandante]

Yes, an RDF format looks like a good solution. It appears that RDF is quite supported in python and that it also abstracts away persistance (http://readthedocs.org/docs/rdflib/en/latest/persistence.htm...) in a way. I ll look into that, thanks.

If you like the basecamp idea for analytics, I am kfk on github, I am doing some demos to get an idea.