Reporting out of Jira Database

Question

Has anyone had any success reporting directly out of the JIRA database? Is it better to pull the data out of the JIRA database and put it into a second sql database which could be built and optimized for our specific reporting needs.

It seems that many of the reporting plugins may not meet our specific business needs.

Scott Dudley [Inactive] · Answer

Wearing my consultant hat, before there were robust reporting tools available, we used to do this regularly for our JIRA consulting clients. Whether or not you need to create a separate database depends on your situation and your needs: if your system is not heavily loaded and you do not need to transform the underlying data in order to perform efficient queries, then querying directly against the JIRA database can work well (but keep in mind Nic's caveats about not hammering the database).

If you need to extract stateful snapshots, perform manipulations that cannot be easily expressed with views or subqueries, you want to add to the schema, or you have a system that is under significant load, then creating a separate database is a better approach.

(Wearing my reporting product vendor hat, it would be interesting to hear what sort of metrics you are trying to extract that you feel cannot be easily met with the existing reporting products!)

Lauma Cīrule · Answer

Hi Dan!

If you have not done so yet, I would like to suggest to check out eazyBI report creation plugin for JIRA.

With eazyBI you can create custom reports based on JIRA data. eazyBI does JIRA data import and saves data in separate eazyBI database to optimize data for reporting needs. This database can be set up on the same JIRA database server.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions about eazyBI or some specific report examples you would be interested in. You can contact me directly on support@eazybi.com

Kind regards,
Lauma

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Replicating the database into a second copy is a good idea - it means your reporting can't accidentally overload your JIRA database (I've seen this happen a couple of times - badly constructed "clever" report hammers the database and takes out JIRA as a result)

But I'd generally advise against trying to do your own reporting.  Unless you have the resources to understand the JIRA database properly, and convert that into a decent data dictionary suitable for your reporting, and maintain it every time JIRA is upgraded.