Pentaho Tutorials

Pentaho

Pentaho is a business intelligence software that provides data integration, reporting, information dashboard, OLAP services, data mining, and extract, transform, and load capabilities. It enhances the overall performance of the business by generating informative reports in various formats such as text, CSV, PDF, Excel, XML, etc. It offers a comprehensive set of BI features that allows improving business performance and efficiency.

Why do we use Pentaho?

Pentaho protects the vast amount of existing or big data organizations data. It can handle any kind of data and provides high visualization and data sources. Pentaho provides 24/7 community support along with several forum support. It is highly scalable and can serve huge volumes of data scaling to billions of terabytes of data. It has a low integration time and low infrastructure cost as compared to other BI tools in the market such as BIA, IBA, SAS BIA, SAP, and many more. It also has an excellent toolset that provides broad applications.

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Features of Pentaho

The essential features of Pentaho are as follows:

• It provides Full-time community support from data sources
• It allows the user to add user-friendly metadata domain to data sources
• The ad-hoc reporting interface offers a step-by-step wizard for designing simple reports. The output formats include HTML,PDF,XLS,and RTF
• It allows the users to execute reports at given intervals
• Connectivity between the reporting tools and the BI server that allows the user to publish the content directly to the BI server
• Pentaho user console web interface is used for managing reports and analyzing views very easily
• Report designer and design studio is used for fine-tuning of reports and Ad-hoc reporting
• It offers enhanced functionalities

Requirements to install Pentaho

The requirements used to install Pentaho software are as follows:

• Hardware requirements:

The Pentaho software doesn’t have any fixed limits on the system or network hardware. It is easy to install and some recommended system specifications to follow

System RAM should be at least 2GB

The space in the Hard drive should be at least 1GM 

It must contain Dual AMD64 or EM64T core processor

• Software requirements:

It supports operating systems such as Linux, Windows, Solaris, Mac 

The system type can be either 32-bit or 64-bit operating system

Required to install Sun JRE 5.0 version

System much consists of Advanced web browsers such as Firefox, internet explorer, Chrome, etc.

• Start with the BI server:

For Windows, click on the start BI server icon.

For Linux run start-Pentaho script on /biserver-ce/directory

• Start with the administrator server:

For Windows, click on start BI enterprise server from the start.

For Linux go to the command window < run the start-up script in /biserver-ce/administration-console//directory.

• Stop the administration server:

For Windows just click on the stop bi-server icon

For Linux, go to the terminal < go to the installed directory < run stop.bat.

Pentaho Administration Console

Pentaho administration console provides a central location from which the administration and the Pentaho deployments. The console aggregates simplify several various administrative tasks such as scheduling jobs, managing users and roles, and managing services. The administration console provides limited functionality compared to the high featured, only subscription, Pentaho Enterprise console. It changes the way the user interacts with Pentaho deployments by automating some tasks that can perform manually.

Pentaho User Console 

The Pentaho User Console is a web-based design environment where the user can analyze data, dashboard reports, create interactive reports, and build integrated dashboards to share Business Intelligence solutions with others. It provides the Design tools that help to develop and redefine the data values that are reported, transformed, modeled, and stored. These tools include the following:

1. Report Designer: Report designer is an advanced report creation tool. It helps to create a complete data-driven report for the user. It gives highly scalable and flexible functionality than the Ad hoc report. It is used to generate detailed perfect pixels reports using virtually any data source
2. Design Studio: Eclipse supports this tool, and it allows you to edit a report or analysis manually. It is used to add modifications to an existing report that cannot be performed by Report Designer.
3. Aggregation Designer: It makes easy deployment and creation of aggregate tables that improves the performance of Mondrian OLAP cubes.
4. Metadata editor: It is used to create metadata models and domains. It is also used to add a custom metadata layer to an existing data source
5. Pentaho data integration: It provides the Extract, Transform, and Load(ETL) abilities that enable the process of cleansing, capturing, and storing data by using a uniform and consistent format that is accessible and relevant to end-users and IoT technologies.

Pentaho Visualization

The Visualization API provides a unified way to visualize data across the Pentaho suite, including PDI, Analyzer, and CDF. It allows the safe and isolated operation between third party applications, business logic, and visualizations.

The Visualization API is built on top of the following Javascript APIs:

• Data API: It provides integration with data sources in the Pentaho platform also with client-side component frameworks
• Type API: It gives features like validation, metadata support, inheritance, and serialization.
• Core API: It includes core features such as theming and services, registration, consumption, and localization.

This tool is used to create, deploy, and configure a visualization.

Pentaho vs Talend

Now let’s understand the difference between Pentaho and Talend

Advantages of using Pentaho

The key benefits of using Pentaho are as follows:

• Easy installation 
• Pentaho BI is an inbuilt tool with the basic concepts that help to work easily
• Streaming engine architecture that helps to provide the ability to work with huge data volumes
• Ease of use and highly scalable
• Offers a user-friendly interface and also various tools to retrieve data from multiple data sources
• Enterprise Data Integration server provides security integration, robust content management, and scheduling with a complete history of jobs and transformations
• It has the capability of running on the Hadoop cluster
• The written JavaScript code in step component can be reused in other components 
• It provides a single package to work on data
• It offers a wide range of Business Intelligence capabilities that includes the dashboard, data integration, Reporting, data mining, interactive analysis, etc.
• It provides 24/7 community support for any technical queries

Disadvantages of using Pentaho

The Basic drawbacks of using Pentaho

• It is a much slower tool when compared to other BI tools
• Lack of a unified interface for all the components
• It offers a limited number of components

For In-depth Knowledge on Pentaho click on below:

• Pentaho Data Integration
• Pentaho Reporting
• Pentaho Business Analytics
• Pentaho Interview Questions