Amazon Cloudsearch can be suitable for some queries that require fast data. For example, in our case, we used CloudSearch, in a tool called Global Search. That will search everything like names, emails and a lot of stuff in our application. If you want fast data and you have a simple query, Global Search isn't appropriate for you.
Elasticsearch is a really scalable solution that can fit a lot of needs, but the bigger and/or those needs become, the more understanding & infrastructure you will need for your instance to be running correctly. Elasticsearch is not problem-free - you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you are not following good practices and/or if are not managing the cluster correctly. Licensing is a big decision point here as Elasticsearch is a middleware component - be sure to read the licensing agreement of the version you want to try before you commit to it. Same goes for long-term support - be sure to keep yourself in the know for this aspect you may end up stuck with an unpatched version for years.
Any scenario where you need to reach back into TIBCO support is something I would highly avoid. Most responses at the second round get you pointed to engaging their professional services. The general mentality seems to be "since our product acquisition cost is low, why don't you engage PS to get the value you need" If you are looking at enterprise scenarios, I would highly recommend looking at other more established products.
As I mentioned before, Elasticsearch's flexible data model is unparalleled. You can nest fields as deeply as you want, have as many fields as you want, but whatever you want in those fields (as long as it stays the same type), and all of it will be searchable and you don't need to even declare a schema beforehand!
Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is super strong financially and they have a great team of devs and product managers working on Elasticsearch. When I first started using ES 3 years ago, I was 90% impressed and knew it would be a good fit. 3 years later, I am 200% impressed and blown away by how far it has come and gotten even better. If there are features that are missing or you don't think it's fast enough right now, I bet it'll be suitable next year because the team behind it is so dang fast!
Elasticsearch is really, really stable. It takes a lot to bring down a cluster. It's self-balancing algorithms, leader-election system, self-healing properties are state of the art. We've never seen network failures or hard-drive corruption or CPU bugs bring down an ES cluster.
Very intuitive tool - An Advanced reporting user can figure out in a day on the end to end operations.
Easy customization - Simple changes in UI makes it less headache for the end user who maintains the tool. Being an open source product (offers Jasper web services) makes a lot developer friendly compared to SSRS, Cognos etc.
Easy Connectivity - Can connect to any data source (can connect to multiple data sources) for a single report - can be customized.
Community - A very strong community available online, videos - on basic how to questions, also provides assistance to use case specific scenarios.
Ease of Reporting - Can create a reports with in few clicks with out struggle.
Domain Designer - A very powerful tool you can create a dataset using clicks with out writing SQL code.
OnDemand Scheduling - A very good scheduling feature and a has got lot more simplistic compared to other popular tools like Cognos.
Jasper Studio - Very good programmatic tool (desktop tool) lets you customize the reports more company specific, can embed complex coding with 3rd party languages like Java, Groovy (scripting language).
Easier to customize the Jasper Server GUI. More flexibility with the input controls look and feel and maybe more input control types to select from.
Have browser event functionality in the reporting itself.
An easier way to iterate through an object. Maybe an option that tells the report Java run-time to stop following the report sequential flow and first integrate through this stated object many times.
An easier way to create a list and add values to this list.
Maybe one could stipulate the process flow of what needs to be computed first in a given field.
The crosstab is a bit buggy on the Jasper studio side, so if that could be improved.
Better and more examples of custom components
The jive functionality on the tables needs an update. It looks so old and outdated.
Even though there are challenges with Architecture, sizing and other areas with Jaspersoft provided that Jaspersoft comes up with the right set of innovation, performance, scalability, and documentation in future it will be great expansion (win-win) situation for the clients and as well as Jaspersoft.
To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.
The overall performance of this platform has been excellent. It is easy to work with the user interface. Creation of digital content and publishing on our social media platforms during marketing has been easy. Running our applications and upgrading our system to meet international standards has been successful. The user dashboard displays reports and performance of all departments effectively.
We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.
We have only had a couple of tickets to be open while using Jaspersoft. Each time we have a very prompte responses that would meet our expectations. We always felt that our issues were being address in a timely manner
While the training was somewhat beneficial, a lot of what was taught to us was what we managed to figure out in the weeks prior. It did provide some useful tips and reference material, but overall something more tailored to our requirements would've been better.
New releases can be very buggy, also lacking when it comes to standard time zones and formats that are outside the US. As a company we never feel comfortable implementing a new release for at least 3-6 months due to errors that are found
I didn't investigate the best alternatives to CloudSearch, but did help with implementing this feature in our application. But from what i tested and used - Cloudsearch is very fast to get queries. Some negative points can be the time to implement this and some configurations that can be tricky.
As far as we are concerned, Elasticsearch is the gold standard and we have barely evaluated any alternatives. You could consider it an alternative to a relational or NoSQL database, so in cases where those suffice, you don't need Elasticsearch. But if you want powerful text-based search capabilities across large data sets, Elasticsearch is the way to go.
Crystal reports is very expensive and does not integrate well with java based servers. Jasper also provides community edition, if we every want to downgrade the use, we always have the option of eliminating the server and using the reports as they are. Jasper also give you the opportunity to build BI on case by base basis including Dashboards.
We have had great luck with implementing Elasticsearch for our search and analytics use cases.
While the operational burden is not minimal, operating a cluster of servers, using a custom query language, writing Elasticsearch-specific bulk insert code, the performance and the relative operational ease of Elasticsearch are unparalleled.
We've easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Elasticsearch vs. RDBMS vs. other no-SQL solutions for our specific set of problems.
Jaspersoft Community Edition has not had any significant impact on our ROI as we have purchased the commercial edition of the product.
The only impact on ROI is that when we bring on new developers, he or she can begin work using the community edition while awaiting the installation of the commercial edition.
