BIRT at Nasa
I’ve been doing things with Eclipse BIRT and in general I’m pretty impressed with it. Especially everything around extensibility: their own Report Object Model (ROM), the Open Data Access (ODA) which is like an extra layer around JDBC allowing for data retrieval from any type of data source, not just relational, and finally the integration with Javascript and Java.
One thing I like a little less though, is that despite the claims, it seems to me that it doesn’t scale so well. Simple reports with only a few pages, can take a good 10 seconds to show which seems like a lot. I hope I’m doing something wrong (or not doing something right), because one of the big things in this new version of BIRT, 2.1, is performance. Also, I know that NASA, or more specifically the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, uses Eclipse and BIRT for reporting data generated by one of their Mars Rover apps, as reported here for example.
I imagine that those apps generate *a lot* of data and therefore the reports will be huge. I also imagine that 3-4 seconds per page is probably not acceptable.
I must be doing something wrong…but what?
wenfeng li said,
April 27, 2006 @ 6:05 am
A report with a few pages should not take 10 s to generate, unless the query on the data source takes most of the time. You can try out the performance of the query in data set preview.
If data query does not take up must of the 10s, please log a bug to BIRT’s bugzilla and attach the report design (or a similar design that shows the issue).
Hari said,
June 15, 2006 @ 10:19 pm
To start with BIRT takes few seconds, but when the 2nd time the report is run it comes fast. To get an actual performance, try with large data 20,000+ rows