Pentaho Tutorial

What is Pentaho?

Pentaho is a business intelligence tool that offers data integration, data mining, reporting, OLAP services information dashboards, and ETL (extract, transform, and load) capabilities. It became a part of Hitachi Vantara in 2017. Pentaho provides a wide range of business solutions to its customers. Besides that, it also provides a set of business intelligence features allowing the customers to improve their business performance and efficiency. This software further cleanses and prepares a diverse amount of data that comes from any source in any environment without code. The users can manage huge volumes and different variety and velocity of data with its visual tools. As a result, it greatly reduces the time and complexity of maintaining and building analytic data pipelines.

Why Pentaho?

Pentaho is a perfect suite of business intelligence features and products. It has both low integration time and a low infrastructural cost as compared to all the other business intelligence tools that are available in the market such as BIA, IBA, and SAP, etc. This software takes lesser time and it has huge community support available for 24 hours a day along with different support forums. Moreover, it is easily scalable and can serve great volumes of data that scales to billions of terabytes of data. Pentaho has unlimited data sources and virtualizations and thus it can handle any type of data. Also, it has a very good toolset that has wide applicability beyond the base of the product. In short, Pentaho is a one-stop solution for the customer’s business analytics needs.

Why you should use Pentaho?

There are a lot of similar BI tools in the market as Pentaho so you might be wondering that if there are so many options available then why one should use Pentaho? Here are the reasons why:

1. It enables 15 times productivity with automation. Users can onboard thousands of data sources quickly and efficiently.
2. Faster production deployment is promised. Without changing the data pipelines, execution engines can be chosen to suit the job.
3. There is an improvement in pipeline quality. No-code functionality is added in the Hadoop environment.
4. Integration is simplified with an intuitive graphical interface.
5. It blends data anywhere on-premise or cloud. Also, it has a containerized architecture that runs anywhere with inline and stepwise visualization of data.
6. Users can switch between Apache Spark and native engine. Moreover, they can extend for analytics with the help of built-in integration.

Pentaho Features

The main objective of Pentaho is to help the organizations across different industries harness value from all of their data available whether it is IoT or big data. It enables them to operate more efficiently, minimize risk, find new revenue streams, and deliver outstanding service. All of this is possible because of the vast number of features that it comes with. They are:

1. Report designer – It is used for creating a pixel-perfect report.
2. Connectivity – It is the connectivity between BI server and reporting tools allowing to publish content directly to the BI server.
3. Metadata editor – Users can add user-friendly metadata domain to data sources.
4. Mailing – Users can mail to other users the published reports.
5. Design studio – Fine tunings of reports and ad-hoc reporting can be done with it.
6. Scheduling sub-system – Reports can be executed by users at given time intervals.
7. User console web interface – It is used for managing reports easily and analyzing views.
8. Ad-hoc reporting interface – Pentaho gives a step-by-step wizard so that users can design simple reports.

Apart from these features, it has intuitive dashboards, predictive analysis, user-friendly interface, cloud analytics, OLAP, customizable features, embedded analytics, and much more.

Pentaho Architecture

The Pentaho stack has 4 elements namely:

1. Presentation Layer: Data can be viewed from web services, browsers, portal, etc. Data available in this is through reporting, dashboards, analytics, and process management.
2. Business Intelligence Platform: It revolves around security and repository.
3. Data and application integration: This is the integration layer of the ETL.
4. Third-party applications: Source database can be anything here.

Pentaho architecture is a three-layered architecture. It has:

1. Data Layer: This is used to connect to the data sources.
2. Server Layer: This is the middle layer where the application runs. Users can deploy their dashboards and reports and can make it available for the end-user.
3. Client Layer: They are of two types namely:

• Thin Client – This runs on the server. For instance – Pentaho analyzer and community dashboard editor.
• Thick Client – This runs as a standalone. For example – data integration and schema workbench.

Pentaho Benefits

Pentaho is one of the most effective and trustworthy open-source business intelligence tools as it gives highly accurate data solutions that can be implemented in the organization. No doubt it is the most popular tool as it provides the following benefits to its customers:

1. It takes the minimum time to install. You can be productive in just one afternoon.
2. Pentaho gives an enterprise-class performance. It improves scalability with the help of a wide range of deployment options such as clustered, cloud-based, or dedicated ETL servers.
3. A simple plug-in architecture is provided to add your custom extensions.
4. It is a 100% java platform with support for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux.
5. The streaming engine architecture allows working with tremendously large volumes of data.
6. Pentaho comes with easy to use graphical designer. Also, it has over 100 different mapping objects including outputs, inputs, and transforms.
7. It provides the perfect environment for developing new business intelligence solutions rapidly with the help of an integrated designer that combines ETL with data visualization and metadata modeling.
8. The enterprise data integration server offers robust content management, security integration, and a schedule that includes full revision history for transformations and jobs.

Pentaho New Offerings

BI/analytics is the most important part of Pentaho but the usefulness of the Pentaho suite has now increased by adding data integration and data mining tools to it. The PDI component features most prominently in its recent release. The new features have been broken down into three areas: boosting team productivity, improving the connectivity to stream the data sources for real-time data processing, and optimizing processing resources. The AEL feature (Adaptive Execution Layer) was added that allows streaming data workflows to be designed. Furthermore, rather than a single server, the Kettle engine is deployed to a cluster of worker nodes that are container-based. Increased data value, reduced complexity, and accelerated data access and querying other few improvements made. Lastly, filtering functionality has been that wasn’t available in the previous version. With its continuous improvements and updates, Pentaho has become a very different product than before when it was launched.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Pentaho

This section highlights the major advantages and disadvantages of Pentaho that will help you get a clear understanding of the product. Despite Pentaho being the most wanted tool, it has a few drawbacks that can’t be overlooked.

Advantages –

• It provides great insights and analytics of the business that gives very useful results.
• Most of its services are free. Besides, it is popular with a lot of features that make it stand out.
• Users can manage and schedule reports as well as obtain scalability and performance as it is very efficient.
• Being such a powerful tool, it allows building ETL projects in a very quick way.
• It is easy to understand. Moreover, it has higher visual interfaces to process and has a lot of features for data mining, ETL, reporting, and integration.
• Pentaho is compatible with many databases like MySQL. Also, users can choose from different types of outputs including rich text, HTML, Excel, etc.
• Lastly, transformations are easy with the drag and drop feature. Also, users can analyze data efficiently and quickly from multiple sources.

Disadvantages –

• Using the report designer feature locks the users into appearance constraints and removing them is a complex task.
• The bugs that appear are not at all easy to solve. Moreover, the errors shown sometimes don’t even give a hint of what is wrong.
• There are a lot of components in it. Thus, it can take some time for new users to fully understand the application.
• As compared to its competitors, the design of this software is quite old.
• Lastly, database connection information often times out after a certain period of time. This problem occurs even if the password isn’t changed.