Great to see BIRT mentioned on HN. I use BIRT to generate PDFs for clients. Modern BI tools are about interactivity and real time but PDFs still have a role in BI and BIRT does the job. As it uses JDBC to connect to data sources you can connect to most data sources. For many tools these days one of the first things you have to check is which data sources does it connect to. If you use a less popular database chances are your database will not be supported. I have worked in organisations that use DB2, Sybase, Oracle and so on and these tend not to be supported by modern BI tools. PDF generation also seems to be a snapshot of the page. So yes BIRT is a great tool, old school and a bit clunky but it does the job.
