Open source BI-stack
In the midst of many ETL and BI tools and associated licensing structures, the is a bright light offering you a way out. Dissel Data Services will gladly offer advice on an alternative route: open source. With the right combination of products, an organisation can quickly move forward in developing the data warehouse and dashboards at very acceptable cost.
With the Community Edition of Pentaho Data Integration you get a powerful and versatile open source ETL tool. The tool can access all common databases as source or target and has a neat interface. There are quirks to the tool and there is some learning curve. A big advantage of this tool is its large worldwide community. For almost every issue, there is a lot of information on forums about causes and solutions. At the end of the day, PDI-CE is a robust, scalable and cost-free data integration platform and is therefore a good alternative.
The open source database Postgres offers fast and cost-free data storage. Data that is "simply" accessible with SQL and is on a par with much more expensive products such as Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle Database. All the functionality you need from a database for data warehousing and BI is there. Postgres is therefore a smart choice for an affordable BI stack.
Metabase is a light open source BI-tool with a nice interface. A BI view or a dashboard is quickly realised, whereby a drill-through to more details or export of the data to Excel is also possible. Metabase is compatible with the most commonly used data sources (including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database and Postgres). In addition, Metabase has a refreshing way of coming up with your own insights into the data on the basis of the metadata. Not always useful, but a nice feature.