report generation on php?

Question

one of the most frequent requests I get is to create XY report for YZ App. These apps are normally built on PHP, so far I have manually created most of this reports, and while I enjoy the freedom of building it as I want, it usually becomes pretty tedious to calculate subtotals, averages, exporting to different formats etc.

What solutions are out there (free/OSS preferred) that help me get this repetitive tasks cranking?

edits:

• I'm talking about reports/summaries from SQL data. Many times from DBs not designed for reporting use.
• while I'm aware of "business-intelligence" we're not ready to implement a full scaled "intelligence" structure, looking more for a helper of sorts...

Answer 1

The problem you're facing is solved by so-called Business Intelligence software. This software tends to be bloated and expensive, but if you know your way around them you will be able to crank out such reports in no time at all.

I'm only familiar with one particular proprietary solution, which isn't too great either. But a quick search turns up the following page, which lists a number of free/open source alternatives:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence_tools

Answer 2

A little Google search gave me the following OSS:

RLib

http://rlib.sicompos.com/

PM Report

http://www.hotscripts.com/Detailed/48187.html

I don't have any information on them, sorry.

Answer 3

It depends on what kind of reports you're talking about. For example... site stats... you could install google analytics and the client could export whatever format they wanted.