I want to create a BI web application, that allows users to set parameters (date ranges, departments, persons, ...) for predefined views (revenue for a year/month/day, sales figures for a shop, ...) and gets a beatiful representation (UI) of the data generated.
I am new to this (BI) field and spent some hours digging into the stack and this is what I thought of: I assumed that I would have to start with setting up an OLAP server (like Mondrian) on my relational database and define schemas on it. I then want to execute predefined queries on the cube (via Pivot4j?) and put the data into a table/chart/view/... on my webpage, I found the d3.js stuff beautiful.
Well, that's a lot of new technology for me. Does the stack I thought about even make sense? Is it possible? Do I even need Pivot4J in that case?
I am a bit overwhelmed right now and would appreciate any advice.
See the Pentaho Business Analytics server. It features Mondrian, Olap4j plugs on top of it to display cube analysis and the CDE/CDF dashboard plugins allow you to plug D3 in a dashboard and build a visualisation. I built a D3 based dashboard a while ago. Although very basic in terms of visualisation, it may be of interest to you to check how to integrate D3 and CDF/CDE.
demo.ubiquis.co.uk:8080/pentaho/api/repos/:public:ubiquis:world_population:world_population.wcdf/generatedContent