Pentaho Data Integration Tutorial: What is, Pentaho ETL Tool
David Carter
What is Pentaho BI?
Pentaho is a Business Intelligence tool which provides a wide range of business intelligence solutions to the customers. It is capable of reporting, data analysis, data integration, data mining, etc. Pentaho also offers a comprehensive set of BI features which allows you to improve business performance and efficiency.
Features of Pentaho
Following, are important features of Pentaho:
- ETL capabilities for business intelligence needs
- Understanding Pentaho Report Designer
- Product Expertise
- Offers Side-by-side subreports
- Unlocking new capabilities
- Professional Support
- Query and Reporting
- Offers Enhanced Functionality
- Full runtime metadata support from data sources
Pentaho BI suite
Now, we will learn about Pentaho BI suite in this Pentaho tutorial:
Pentaho BI Suite includes the following components:
Pentaho Reporting
Pentaho Reporting depends on the JFreeReport project. It helps you to fulfill your business reporting needs. This component also offers both scheduled and on-demand report publishing in popular formats such as XLS, PDF, TXT, and HTML.
Analysis
It offers a wide range of analysis a wide range of features that includes a pivot table view. The tool provides enhanced GUI features (using Flash or SVG), integrated dashboard widgets, portal, and workflow integration.
Moreover, Pentaho Spreadsheet Services allows a user to browse, pivot, and use chart from within MS Excel.
Dashboards
The dashboard offers Reporting and Analysis, which contribute content to Pentaho Dashboards. The self-service dashboard designer includes extensive built-in dashboard templates and layout. It allows business users to build personalized dashboards with little training.
Data Mining
Data mining tool discovers hidden patterns and indicators of future performance. It offers the most comprehensive set of machine learning algorithms from the Weka project, which includes clustering, decision trees, random forests, principal component analysis, neural networks.
It allows you to view data graphically, interact with it programmatically, or use multiple data sources for reports, further analysis, and other processes.
Pentaho Data Integration
This component is used to integrate data wherever it exists.
Rich transformation library with over 150 out-of-the-box mapping objects.
It supports a wide range of data source which includes more than 30 open source and proprietary database platforms, flat files. It also helps Big Data analytics with integration and management of Hadoop data.
Who are using Pentaho BI?
Pentaho BI is a widely used tool by may software professionals like:
- Open source software programs
- Business analyst and researcher
- College students
- Business intelligence councilor
How to Install Pentaho in AWS
Following is a step by step process on How to Install Pentaho in AWS.
Step 1) Click Continue to Subscribe
Go to https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-mce2xdbgie4ro and click Continue
Step 2) Accept Terms & Conditions
On next page, Accept License Agreement
Step 3) Click Continue to Configuration
Proceed for Configuration
Step 4) Click Continue to Launch
Keep the settings default, and Click to Launch
Step 5) Wait for 5 minutes for instance to launch
Check the usage instructions and wait
Step 6) Get Public IP
Copy Public IP of the instance.
Step 7) Use the public IP for Login
Paste public IP of the instance to access Pentaho.
Prerequisite of Pentaho
- Hardware requirements
- Software requirements
- Downloading and installing Bl suite
- Starting the Bl suite
- Administration of the Bl suite
Hardware requirement
The Pentaho Bl Suite software does not have any fix limits on a computer or network hardware as long as you can meet the minimum software requirements. It is easy to install this Business intelligence tool. However, a recommended set of system specifications:
| RAM | Minimum 2GB |
| Hard drive space | Minimum 1GB |
| Processor | Dual-core EM64T or AMD64 |
Software requirements
- Installation of Sun JRE 5.0
- The environment can be either 32-bit or 64-bit
- Supported Operating systems: Linux, Solaris, Windows, Mac
- A workstation that has a modern web browser interface such as Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox
To start Bl-server
- On Windows from the start, button click on start Bl server icon.
- On Linux OS run start-pentaho script on /biserver-ce/directory
To start the administrator server
- On Windows from start button click on start Bl enterprise server.
- For Linux: goto the command window and run the start-up script in /biserver-ce/administration-console/directory.
To Stop administrator server
- To stop the server in windows, click on stop bi-server icons.
- On Linux. You need to go to the terminal and goto installed directory and run stop.bat
Pentaho Administration Console
Report Designer
It is an advanced report creation tool. This is an ideal tool for you if you want to build a complete data-drive report. This tool offers plenty of flexibility and functionality than the ad hoc reporting capabilities of the Pentaho User Console.
Design Studio
It is an Eclipse-based tool. It allows you to hand-edit a report or analysis. It is widely used to add modifications to an existing report that cannot be added with Report Designer.
Aggregation Designer
This graphical tool allows you to improve Mondrian cube efficiency.
Metadata Editor
It is used to add custom metadata layer to any existing data source.
Pentaho Data Integration
The Kettle extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, which enables
Pentaho Tool vs. BI stack
| Pentaho Tool | BI Stack |
|---|---|
| Data Integration (PDI) | ETL |
| It offers metadata Editor | It provides metadata management |
| Pentaho BA | Analytics |
| Reports Designer | Operational Reporting |
| Saiku | Ad-hoc Reporting |
| CDE | Dashboards |
| Pentaho User Console (PUC) | Governance/Monitoring |
Advantages of Pentaho
Now in this Pentaho data integration tutorial, we will learn about some advantages of Pentaho Business Intelligence Tool:
- Pentaho BI is a very intuitive tool. With some basic concepts, you can work with it.
- Simple and easy to use Business Intelligence tool
- Offers a wide range of BI capabilities which includes reporting, dashboard, interactive analysis, data integration, data mining, etc.
- Comes with a user-friendly interface and provides various tools to Retrieve data from multiple data sources
- Offers single package to work on Data
- Has a community edition with a lot of contributors along with Enterprise edition.
- The capability of running on the Hadoop cluster
- JavaScript code written in the step components can be reused in other components.
Disadvantages of Pentaho
Here, are cons/drawbacks of using Pentaho BI tool:
- The design of the interface can be weak, and there is no unified interface for all components.
- Much slower tool evolution compared to other BI tools.
- Pentaho Business analytics offers a limited number of components.
- Poor community support. So, if you don’t get a working component, you need to wait till the next version is released.
Summary
- Pentaho is a Business Intelligence tool which provides a wide range of business intelligence solutions to the customers
- It offers ETL capabilities for business intelligence needs.
- Pentaho suites offer components like Report, Analysis, Dashboard, and Data Mining
- Pentaho Business Intelligence is widely used by 1) Business analyst 2) Open source software programmers 3) Researcher and 4) College Students.
- The installation process of Pentaho includes: 1)Hardware requirements 2) Software requirements, 3) Downloading Bl suite, 4) Starting the Bl suite, and 5) Administration of the Bl suite
- Important components of Pentaho Administration console are 1) Report Designer, 2) Design Studio, 3) Aggregation Designer 4) Metadata Editor 5) Pentaho Data Integration
- Pentaho is a Data Integration (PDI) tool while BI stack is an ETL Tool.
- The biggest advantage of Pentaho is that it is simple and easy to use Business Intelligence tool.
- The main drawback of Pentaho is that it is a much slower tool evolution compared to other BI tools