Welcome to Pentaho for Big Data Analytics! There are three distinct terms here: Pentaho, Big Data, and Analytics.
Pentaho is one of the most powerful open source Business Intelligence (BI) platforms available today on the enterprise application market. Pentaho has everything needed for all the stages, from a data preparation stage to a data visualization stage. And recently, it gained more attention as it can work with Big Data. The biggest advantage of Pentaho over its peers is its recent launch, the Adaptive Big Data Layer.
One of the drawbacks of Pentaho is that when you need to customize it further, it requires a steep learning curve; this is what most Pentaho implementers are facing. It is understandable that to use a complex software such as Business Intelligence, you need to have an understanding of data modeling concepts such as star schema or data fault, how to further mapping or configurations that suit your client's needs, and also the understanding of the possibilities of customization.
Big Data is becoming one of the most important technology trends in the digital world, and has the potential to change the way organizations use data to enhance user experience and transform their business models. So how does a company go about maintaining Big Data with cheaper hardware? What does it mean to transform a massive amount of data into meaningful knowledge?
This book will provide you with an understanding of what comprises Pentaho, what it can do, and how you can get on to working with Pentaho in three key areas: a Pentaho core application, Pentaho visualizations, and working with Big Data (using Hadoop).
Also, it will provide you with insights on how technology transitions in software, hardware, and analytics can be done very easily using Pentaho—the leading industry in open source stack. This book will mainly talk about the ways to perform analytics and visualize those analytics in various charts so that the results can be shared across different channels.
Chapter 1, The Rise of Pentaho Analytics along with Big Data, serves as a quick overview of the Pentaho tools and its history around BI Space, weaving in stories on the rise of Big Data.
Chapter 2, Setting Up the Ground, gives a quick installation reference for users who are new to the Pentaho BI platform. Topics covered in this chapter are installation of the Pentaho BI Server, configuration of the server, and running it for the first time.
Chapter 3, Churning Big Data with Pentaho, introduces Hadoop as the Big Data platform, shows you how to set it up through a local installation and a cloud-based installation, and tells you how it's used with Pentaho.
Chapter 4, Pentaho Business Analytics Tools, provides a way to distinguish a signal from noise. You will get familiar with various design tools that will help you to build amazing dashboards and set up reports with the help of the data analytics capability.
Chapter 5, Visualization of Big Data, discusses the various visualization tools available in Pentaho. It talks about Pentaho Instaview, which helps data scientists/analysts to move from data to analytics in just three steps.
Appendix A, Big Data Sets, discusses data preparation with one sample illustration from stock exchange data.
Appendix B, Hadoop Setup, takes you through the configuration of the third-party Hadoop distribution, Hortonworks, which is used throughout the book for various examples.