The Pentaho BI Server is a collection of software components that provide the architecture and infrastructure required to build business intelligence solutions. With the Pentaho BI Server, you are able to run reports, visualize dashboards, schedule tasks, and more. Among these tasks, there is the ability to run Kettle jobs and transformations. This recipe shows you the minor changes you might have to make in order to be able to run Kettle jobs and transformations.
In order to follow this recipe, you will need some experience with the Pentaho BI Server.
For configuring the Pentaho BI server, you obviously need the software. You can download the latest version of the Pentaho BI Server from the following URL:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/files/Business%20Intelligence%20Server/
If you intend to run jobs and transformations from a Kettle repository, then make sure you have the name of the repository and proper credentials (user and password).
Carry out the following steps:
- If you intend to run a transformation or a job from a file, skip to the How it works section.
- Edit the
settings.xmlfile located in theiserver-cepentaho-solutionssystemkettlefolder inside the Pentaho BI Server installation folder. - In the
repository.typetag, replace the default valuefileswithrdbms. Provide the name of your Kettle repository and the user and password, as shown in the following example:<kettle-repository> <!-- The values within <properties> are passed directly to the Kettle Pentaho components. --> <!-- This is the location of the Kettle repositories.xml file, leave empty if the default is used: $HOME/.kettle/repositories.xml --> <repositories.xml.file></repositories.xml.file> <repository.type>rdbms</repository.type> <!-- The name of the repository to use --> <repository.name>pdirepo</repository.name> <!-- The name of the repository user --> <repository.userid>dev</repository.userid> <!-- The password --> <repository.password>1234</repository.password> </kettle-repository>
- Start the server. It will be ready to run jobs and transformations from your Kettle repository.
If you want to run Kettle transformations and jobs, then the Pentaho BI server already includes the Kettle libraries. The server is ready to run both jobs and transformations from files. If you intend to use a repository, then you have to provide the repository settings. In order to do this, you just have to edit the settings.xml file, as you did in the recipe.
To avoid any inconvenience, be sure that the version of the libraries included are the same or newer than the version of Kettle you are using. For instance, Pentaho BI Server 3.7 includes Kettle 4.1 libraries. If you are using a different version of the server, then you can verify the Kettle version by looking in the following folder:
iserver-ce omcatwebappspentahoWEB-INFlib
This folder is inside the server installation folder. You should look for files named kettle-core-TRUNK-SNAPSHOT .jar, kettle-db-TRUNK-SNAPSHOT.jar, and kettle-engine-TRUNK-SNAPSHOT.jar.
Unzip any of them and look for the META-INFMANIFEST.MF file. There, you will find the Kettle version. You will see a line like this: Implementation-Version: 4.1.0.
There is even an easier way: In the Pentaho User Console (PUC), look for the option 2. Get Environment Information inside the Data Integration with Kettle folder of the BI Developer Examples solution; run it and you will get detailed information about the Kettle environment.