After my first preview of the SQL Power's Wabit product and my subsequent perspectives on SQL Power Architect and SQL Power DQguru, I was able to arrange a quick Q & A with the CEO of SQL Power, Sam Selim.

Even having been in the Toronto business intelligence community for the past half decade, I hadn't actually heard of SQL Power until late last year. I guess that's the price I paid for living in the relatively insular IBM Cognos mind space. One of the things that I like so much about the open source offerings of SQL Power and other companies is that their solutions, while capable of running on Windows, are not Windows centric. I have run all of the freely available SQL Power applications on a Mac.

Putting my "industry analyst" hat on: With business intelligence implementations, costs can add up quickly beyond the scope of the BI software itself. You've got to pay for OS licenses, database licenses, etc. etc. The great thing about the offerings from companies like SQL Power is that you have the option of running the software on free operating systems using free database engines. The licensing for the BI software is usually per server with a reasonable annual maintenance cost. From the get go, a company can save tens of thousands of dollars of initial license costs. Those savings can be redirected into consulting effort, which is nothing to sneeze at. For the price you might pay for a large "name brand" solution in raw licensing and infrastructure, you could already have at least a partially customized solution in place.

Getting off my high horse, I'd like to thank Sam Selim from SQL Power for taking the time to respond to my questions. The responses are below.

How did SQL Power come to be? Can you tell us a little about your company?

SQL Power was founded by CEO/CTO Sam Selim in 1988 after leaving Oracle Corporation. Although it started as a Database Consulting firm specializing in Oracle, by 1996 SQL Power had grown to focus on Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehousing across all relational database platforms. We strive to develop intuitive BI software that just works, in order to provide easy-to-use and lower-cost alternatives to proprietary BI Development tools.

What drove your company to create its own suite of tools, as opposed to building a business on a previously-established toolset like IBM Cognos or Microstrategy?

BI software development often involves a trade-off between ease-of-use and feature-richness. While most vendors opt to sacrifice ease-of-use for the feature race, SQL Power stands steadfast in our commitment to provide the most intuitive BI Tools on the market. For example, the

SQL Power Wabit BI Reporting tool can be used by a business user with little or no SQL training whatsoever - making it the most intuitive BI Reporting tool on the market.

Ease of use seems to be one of the primary design goals of your products. What else would you say differentiates your products from its competitors?

Aside from being intuitive and having a surprisingly short learning curve, SQL Power's products also install in just minutes and start working with little or no configuration required - which instantly sets them apart from most other Open Source alternatives.

Cost is another of our key differentiators. Our software is far less expensive than most proprietary or Open Source alternatives, and we also offer unlimited user licenses per server -- regardless of the number of CPUs -- making it very affordable for larger organizations to switch to our product line.

Another differentiator our users tend to notice is our attention to detail, specifically in regards to cross-platform compatibility. We put a lot of work into ensuring our products work well on Windows, OS X, and Unix. Most of our competitors built their tools in Java too, but that alone is not enough. It takes dedicated effort to make the same GUI work well on different platforms. For example, we make sure Ctrl-Click activates context menus on Mac, we ensure dialogs lay out properly with various font and component sizes, and we order the OK and Cancel buttons in a platform-sensitive way. Even just putting the About and Preferences menu items in the right place by platform is a big help for end users. Although these finishing touches have nothing to do with BI, as a user, they help you focus on the BI problem rather than the tool's user interface.

Do you believe that taking an Open Source approach to your product line has helped increase SQL Power's profile and/or credibility in the Business Intelligence marketplace?

Absolutely: the Open Source approach has resulted in hundreds of thousands of downloads for our products, and has exposed our products to tens of thousands of users and prospects. Especially in this tough economic climate, we find that many value-oriented organizations are switching to Open Source alternatives in order to reduce the overall cost of their BI program.

If you had to sum it up in a few sentences, why should an organization consider choosing SQL Power to address their Business Intelligence needs?

SQL Power products are more intuitive, more affordable, and they simply work. They eliminate the need to hire high-priced consultants to install, configure and develop the first phase of a project, as is common with most BI tools on the market. SQL Power also offers low-cost (and sometimes even free)

BI conversion services to wean organizations away from their more expensive and complicated BI environment, and onto SQL Power's more affordable and intuitive tools.

If I wanted to learn more about SQL Power, what should my next step be?

We encourage users to download and evaluate our products, so they can experience first-hand how much more productive our tools are compared to their existing BI platform. All of SQL Power's Open Source BI tools can be downloaded free of charge from our website. We also offer a free Support Forum for those that would like certain questions answered prior to purchasing annual support.

Full Disclosure

Braintapper Knowledge Solutions, Inc. was not paid for this interview. At the time of publication, Braintapper had no business affiliations with SQLPower.ca, nor had Braintapper received any software or products of monetary value in exchange for this blog article.

After checking out WABIT, I decided to give a quick look at SQLPower.ca's other free offerings: Power*Architect and DQGuru. Note that SQLPower's Dashboard and Power Loader (ETL) tools do not appear to be free, open source software. I won't be offering any opinions on the non-free products. In any case, I don't really have any preference when it comes to Dashboard apps (right now at least), and when it comes to ETL tools, I'm still quite partial to Pentaho Data Integration.

Power*Architect

Power*Architect is a data modeling tool in the vein of ERStudio and ERWin. Many independent consultants (like me) will probably find it hard to justify spending scads of cash for a tool like ERStudio for their data modeling activities. Myself, I use MySQL Workbench, which is quite good. The only limitation is that... it only works with MySQL.

Here's where SQLPower's Power*Architect comes in. It's free (unless you need support), and it's multiplatform. If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm a Mac-centric user. While I do use virtual machines for Windows-based work, it's often nice to be able to run apps natively in the Mac desktop. Don't get me wrong, Power*Architect doesn't have the look and feel of a true Mac app. It feels more like a Windows app in a SWING container, but that works fine with me. This isn't an app designed for Joe Sixpack, so it doesn't need to have the eye candy, no matter how nice that would be.

My perspective on this app is coming from a ERStudio and MySQL Workbench user, and to be honest, I didn't read the manual. After about 10 minutes of use, I pretty much figured out how to use the interface. It's not that hard to figure out - a very good thing. I haven't delved into those detail level features, but on the surface, it appears that Power*Architect can easily satisfy that 80/20 proportion of must-have versus nice-to-have functionality.

Bottom line - am I going to use it? I'm definitely going to give it a whirl for a few months. I'll post a follow up summary at a later date, but in the meantime, I suggest that anyone on a tight budget who needs a data modeling tool check it out.

DQGuru

DQGuru is an interesting beast to me. SQLPower advertises as a data cleansing tool. Specifically, DQGuru de-duplicates, cleanses and performs address correction.

Most of my experience with data cleansing came at the ETL level, and I haven't really had the chance to play with a dedicated tool like DQGuru. Messing around with it (yeah, I should really read manuals), it is best described as a data cleanser for business users. You construct your projects in a wizard like fashion, and SQLPower keeps the user interface fairly simple to insulate them from what's going on in the back end. I would recommend this for database savvy analysts, but the hard core control freaks (like me) would probably prefer the control you get from the likes of a Pentaho Data Integration or IBM Information Server.

Like Power*Architect, I figured out how DQGuru works in a matter of minutes.

I don't see myself using DQGuru very often, but I can definitely see value when you have a quick and dirty cleansing job to process. DQGuru is a good tool for advanced end users who don't want or need to be messing around with complicated SQL (or regular expressions, for that matter) to perform common data cleansing tasks.

Good Times for BI

I really have to say, these are good times for the business intelligence market. The "free" offerings out there are getting better, especially since many open source projects are backed by real companies. Companies like SQLPower, Pentaho and Jedox are really going to give the big vendors a run for the money, especially in the small to medium enterprise space.