In the era of data explosion, the explosive growth of enterprise data, the use of big data analysis to achieve refined operations, to drive business growth has become the consensus of most enterprises.
Compared with traditional BI, self-service BI emphasizes ease of use, more visual interactive operation interfaces, automatic modeling, and business personnel can perform analysis operations without writing code, further reducing the threshold for data analysis. Therefore, it is accepted by more and more people and becomes more and more popular.
At present, there are many self-service BI tools that can be found on the market, such as: Tableau, Qlikview, PowerBI, FineBI, Superset, etc. There are both open source and commercial, how should you choose?
Obviously, the correct selection of a suitable tool can not only simplify the complicated work of data analysis, but also greatly improve the analysis efficiency and quality. The author believes that unless your company's technical strength is strong enough, it is not recommended to use open source, it is better to spend some money on commercial products. Compared with open source, commercial products have a better operating experience and more peace of mind, and the cost may not be much higher than open source. After all, the learning cost of open source is not low, and it is difficult to play without any technical strength.
Closer to home, the FineBI introduced in this article is one of the purely domestic commercial self-service BI tools. It belongs to FanRuan's products. Although it is not from a well-known manufacturer, it has many users. Official data shows that the total number of enterprise users has exceeded 6,500. Among them, there are many well-known enterprises with high product maturity and outstanding cost performance.
▲The picture comes from the screenshot of the official website of FanRuan
1. Abundant learning materials
FineBI has a wealth of online learning help resources. Contains community, video tutorials, help documents, learning experiences, technical solutions, etc. These resources can greatly reduce the cost of learning and make FineBI one of the easiest self-service BI data analysis tools I can find.
2. Data visualization
If you are looking for a cool and rich visualization tool, FineBI may be a good choice. Maybe the FineBI visualization effect is not so cool and dazzling, but it is very rich.
It supports column charts, line charts, pie charts, radar charts, scatter charts, doughnut charts, bar charts, maps, stacked charts, area charts, combination charts, bubble charts, heat maps, GIS maps, dashboards, A variety of chart types and icon styles such as full-distance chart, Gantt chart, book chart, etc., and also supports the integration of third-party chart plug-ins.
FineBI提供了多屏数据可视化管理解决方案。从PC端到移动端(PAD/PHONE)再到数据大屏，企业无须专门再为此设计。据了解，FineBI移动端采用原生与HTML5两种解析方式，功能可媲美PC端数据分析体验。
三、支持丰富的数据源链接
众所周知，伴随着自身信息化程度的不断提高，企业系统中的信息系统数量也越来越多，ERP，CRM，OA甚至专业的财务软件等。随着系统数据来源的增多，整合调用数据就会耗费大量的时间精力。
FineBI支持Hadoop、GreenPlumn、Kylin、星环等大数据平台，支持SAP HANA、SAP BW、SSAS、EssBase等多维数据库，支持MongoDB、SQLite、Cassandra等NOSQL数据库，也支持传统的关系型数据库、程序数据源等。
值得一提的是，FineBI提供多种功能支持对原始数据进行二次加工处理来规范数据，支持ETL流，而目前市面上的BI工具大都不支持ETL功能，要么需要IT人员写大量的SQL，要么应用第三方工具。
四、价格版本
FineBI官网提供免费试用，支持Windows、Linux、Mac等系统安装，从FineBI官网下载最新版本的安装文件，双击打开，按照安装引导一直点击下一步即可，其中安装文件夹和JVM内存可以自行设定，一般默认即可，安装完成后打开FineBI程序图标，即可运行。(注：FineBI安装包自带Tomcat配置环境)
特别提醒：从FineBI官网下载的FineBI软件是未注册版本，没有注册的版本包含所有功能，无使用期限，但限2个并发。
注册版需要付费，但价格并不透明，据笔者了解到的信息，按功能点和并发付费，具体收费标准请自行联系厂商。
据最新更新日志可以看出，最近功能点也在以插件化或其他形式在不断的更新迭代，包括直连、图表新特性、新图表、底层性能优化及全局样式等。
In general, FineBI is an independent BI product that is easy to learn and mature. Compared with competing products from well-known manufacturers, it has both advantages and disadvantages. But anyway, among many self-service BI tools, FineBI is also a good choice.
This article is excerpted from IT168: http://tech.it168.com/a2017/0717/3147/000003147794.shtml