Comparison of reporting engines for Force.com

Question

I'm investigating options for reporting on data in a custom salesforce application, since the built-in reporting tool is a bad joke.

The requirements are that the data needs to be accessible on-demand through the Salesforce website (likely through a web-tab, visualforce page, etc.), and must be able to do arbitrary joins of the tables, like ANY other relational database reporting tool. It is a huge plus to be able to give much of the specific report-design power to the end user, as well. Ideally it would play well with Oracle if an external DBMS is required, though this is not a strict requirement.

I hear good things about MS SQL Reporting Services, and there has been some talk around here about Crystal Reports. I'd be much obliged to get any thoughts and opinion on the various options and approaches out there.

Answer 1

It may be worth looking at tools similar to Teiid. What this does is provides a standard sql jdbc interface to any data source - including salesforce. With that in mind, that means you can then use any reporting tool. It also allows you to join across data sources etc.

I'm glad you call the current salesforce tool a joke! :)

As for reporting, we use Pentaho from the open source world, which is a very powerful tool, but does take some learning. Of course, the final decision wont just come down to functionality, but cost too, and this is where Pentaho is likely to win hands down. Pentaho plays very well with Oracle, and also MySQL too. (And many more dbs)

Finally you probably want to nail down your requirements a bit more. Do you need plain reporting, dashboards, more advanced analysis? Data mining? How far do you need to go..