In this chapter we talk about Pentaho, the fastest growing, most active, most popular, and most heavily invested in Open Source Business Intelligence (OSBI) suite in recent years. We analyze its principal characteristics and the principal projects included in the suite.
With Pentaho Business Analytics (BA ) Server, we have full BI analytic power at our fingertips through a GNU General Public License (GPL ).
We will see how Pentaho Report Designer (PRD) and Pentaho BA Server interact, and how we can use them to run our reports from Pentaho User Console (PUC). At the end of this chapter, we will have Pentaho BA Server running and will be able to access our reports from a web browser.
In this chapter we will do the following:
- Download and install Pentaho BA Server
- Configure the MySQL JDBC driver in Pentaho BA Server
- Run Pentaho BA Server and log in with Pentaho User Console (PUC)
- Create a solutions folder in our Pentaho BA Server repository
- Publish a report from PRD in the BI Server
- See how to import PRD reports from PUC, how to create a URL for our reports, and how to create a schedule
Finally, we propose that you complete a series of tasks related to the topics in this chapter.
Pentaho is an open source / free software project whose goal is to create Business Intelligence solutions. Pentaho's license is the GNU GPL and its principal functionalities are as follows:
Tip
Some important links for Pentaho are as follows:
- Main site: www.pentaho.com
- Official forum: http://forums.pentaho.com
- Official community: community.pentaho.com
We can define Pentaho as a solutions-oriented and process-centered platform:
- It is solutions oriented because when we talk about developing or implementing a project in Pentaho, we are talking about developing or implementing a solution. Physically creating a solution in Pentaho means creating a folder with a given path (we will discuss this more in depth soon) The resources and components that will attack this particular business problem are found in a structure in this folder.
- It is process centered because each component, for example, a report, must go through a process to be run, and this process is generally the same. Pentaho has a process motor in its kernel that basically supports inputs, a series of ordered tasks (process chain), and a final output. At the same time, each Pentaho process can be run within other processes, allowing for carrying out very complex tasks, and gives great flexibility. Pentaho processes are described in XML.
Note
Many Pentaho processes are created automatically and in a very habitual manner. One way to create a process is for the user to select the option create a new report. What Pentaho does in this case is create, invisibly to the user, the process that will carry out the task with its respective inputs, process chain, and outputs.
The Pentaho suite is made up of multiple independent components that carry out specific functions of sending mails, visualizing graphics, and so on, and that work together to create and distribute Business Intelligence solutions.
Pentaho works through the combined use of these components.
In the following diagram, we can see the big picture of how the Pentaho components relate to each other:
We will not go into detail about this diagram, but we want to highlight Pentaho's modular and layered design. It is this design that lets Pentaho replace or modify its components and in doing so add new functionalities by, for example, using other programs from outside the suite, such as Eclipse BIRT and Jasper Reports.
In the Pentaho Users' Community, there are many projects that develop new plugins or components or modify existing ones in order to meet the needs of this group of users faced with a business problem. What Pentaho Corporations does in these cases is evaluates these projects and, if it sees fit, adopts them. A good example of this is the CTools of Webdetails, whose company was acquired by Pentaho recently.
Pentaho is made up of a series of independent projects that make it a complete Business Intelligence suite. Among the most important projects in the Pentaho suite, we find the following:
- Pentaho BA Server: A web application that makes up one of the fundamental pieces of the Pentaho suite. One of its principal functions is to let the user access and interact with BI content, for example, by easily visualizing PRD reports. Pentaho BA Server's graphic interface is called PUC.
- Pentaho User Console (PUC): This is the web application through which the user can navigate and interact with business components, such as reports, dashboards, analysis, and so on, and also administer and configure the BI server.
- Pentaho Report Designer (PRD): This is the reporting tool used to create advanced and highly complex reports, which is the subject of this book.
- Pentaho Data Integration (PDI): This is a powerful data integration tool.
- Pentaho Analysis (Mondrian OLAP server): This is a multidimensional engine that resolves Interactive analysis or OLAP analysis queries.
- Pentaho Data Mining (Weka): This is a versatile data mining tool.
- Pentaho Metadata Editor (PME): This is a tool that lets us create, edit, and publish Business Models. Business Models are used to create ad hoc reports.
- Pentaho Schema Workbench (PSW): This is the tool used to create, edit, and publish either multidimensional models or Mondrian schema.
- Pentaho Aggregate Designer (PAD): This is the tool that is used to improve the performance of multidimensional queries. It creates a series of precalculated data that will be used automatically by Mondrian to reduce the cost of the queries.
- Saiku: This is an attractive OLAP viewer with a very pleasant UI.
- CTools: This is a set of tools used principally for the creation of dashboards.
It is worth mentioning that all the programs in the Pentaho suite that we have mentioned have open source and/or Free Software licenses.
Pentaho Corporation was founded in 2004, and since 2008, there has been an Enterprise version of the suite, that is, a paid version that is, in some ways, different from the community version.
The evolution of different versions of the Pentaho BA Server can be seen in SourceForge via the following link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/files/Business%20Intelligence%20Server/. The following graph shows the evolution of the Pentaho BA Server:
It is worth noting that over the years there has been a reduction in the time taken between the publication of each new version and between the injection of new technologies into each new version.