Are you a beginner and looking to gain some knowledge of Pentaho? Then, you are in the right place. From data exploration to data reporting, Pentaho is a popular tool used extensively by many companies. Having a good understanding of SQL queries and knowledge on Java will be an added advantage for the people who want to work on the Pentaho BI suite. In this post, we will give you a basic understanding of the Pentaho BI suite. We will explain all the Pentaho concepts and the installation procedure as well. This post is well suited for people who want to work on dynamic reports in Pentaho or any data analyst. Let us get started.
Pentaho is a data integration and analytics platform that offers data integration, OLAP services, reporting, data mining, and ETL capabilities. It was founded in the year 2004 with its headquarters in Orlando, Florida. It was later acquired by Hitachi in 2015. It is built on top of the Java programming language. It can be installed on operating systems like Windows, Linux, macOS X.
Pentaho BI suite offers a set of tools for data management. It analyzes and visualizes data in everyday workflow. It is used for relational and analytical reporting. It can process huge volumes of data in less time. It includes powerful and comprehensive reporting that meets business needs. It uses analytical modeling and machine learning to simplify the process of data preparation.
It can connect to any data source like SQL databases, OLAP data sources, Excel, XML, PDF, flat files, Hadoop, etc. Users can create enhanced dashboards that help in data understanding. Once a report creation is done, it can be exported to Excel, HTML, PDF, or CSV files. Pentaho improves data pipeline management and increases productivity.
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Below are some of the features of the Pentaho BI suite.
The following are the main advantages of the Pentaho BI suite.
It has the following components.
Reporting
The Pentaho BI reporting is useful for report creation. It works in association with the JFreeReport Project. Users can connect their data sources and start creating reports on the data. It has a web interface through which non-technical users can also create reports. The reports can be exported to HTML documents, Excel, PDF, plain text, etc. The reports can then be shared among peers through email or the web.
Analysis
Pentaho has a powerful analysis capability that allows users to view the data as soon as it is connected. It provides views by regions, channels, periods, etc. It also encompasses data navigation and exploration capabilities that help the users in getting deep insights from the data. Users can pivot the dimensions of data to get a general view. They can also add peers to give access to specific analysis.
Dashboards
The dashboards in Pentaho helps in monitoring the organization's performance. It has well-reported content with a lean layout. It offers various templates and layouts that users can choose from. It has KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). It can send alerts based on some predetermined business rules that help track exceptions.
Data Mining
Pentaho's data mining helps in discovering hidden insights from data. It finds patterns and correlations in data. The patterns can further be used for forecasting future business trends. It offers various machine learning algorithms for decision trees, random forests, clustering, principal component analysis, neural networks. It provides faster processing and accurate results.
Data Integration
The Pentaho Data Integration allows the integration of data from multiple sources like databases and applications. It has a rich transformation library with 150 mapping objects. It offers connections for 30 open source and proprietary database platforms. It can get data from Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relations Management applications, and legacy systems. The data integration will be based on metadata. It also supports big data analytics Hadoop data management.
Report Designer
It is a visual report writer. Users can create charts, graphs, subreports, etc. It can query data from SQL, MDX, static table definitions, etc. It has a core reporting engine to build reports based on XML definition files. It is very flexible and provides ad-hoc reporting capabilities.
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Design Studio
To implement business logic, it provides special XML scripts called xactions. The Design Studio is a modified version of the Eclipse Development Environment which understands the action scripts. It offers transformation files for automation and business logic tasks.
Aggregate Designer
It operates on the Pentaho Analysis (Mondrian) XML schema files. It can generate precalculated and aggregated answers that speed up query execution. It generates SQL queries which result in the creation of tables.
Metadata Editor
It acts as an abstraction layer for the underlying data sources. The Metadata Editor is useful for creating business metadata models. These metadata models are in turn, used for creating reports in Saiku Reporting, Pentaho Interactive Reporting, and Pentaho's legacy ad-hoc reporting plug-in applications.
Pentaho BI suite can install on-premises and on the cloud too. Let us see the process of installing it on-premise.
Prerequisites
Installation
The first step is to download the Pentaho Reporting Designer. Here are the download links,
Windows - https://sourceforge.net/projects/jfreereport/files/04.%20Report%20Designer/3.7.0-stable/prd-ce-3.7.0-stable.zip/download
Linux - http://sourceforge.net/projects/jfreereport/files/04.%20Report%20Designer/3.7.0-stable/prd-ce-3.7.0-stable.tar.gz/download
MacOS - http://sourceforge.net/projects/jfreereport/files/04.%20Report%20Designer/3.7.0-stable/prd-ce-mac-3.7.0-stable.tar.gz/download
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An archive file will get downloaded to your local machine. Unzip the archive file and extract the files to your desired location. It is recommended to store the files in the 'Program Files' directory. If you are using a Windows operating system, run the *.bat file. If you are using Linux or macOS operating system, run the *.sh file. This will start the Pentaho Report Designer.
Pentaho is an efficient data management tool. It is available in both community edition and enterprise edition. The enterprise edition licensing is in 3 levels - enterprise, premium, and standard. The Pentaho platform is continuously upgraded with new features. The new features are available as plug-ins. Pentaho customer support is available always and gives timely responses. Major companies like Bank of America, Centro, Lufthansa, JP Morgan, Dell, OLX, etc.
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