Data Warehouse Solution

What is Pentaho?

Pentaho is an open-source reporting application, with several enterprise capabilities such as chart generation, dashboards, data mining, and pivot table analysis. Pentaho is a 100% Java application, based on the JBOSS application server and JBOSS Portal for advanced user customization of dashboards.

Pentaho also uses several other open-source components, such as:

JFreeChart for chart generation

JFreeReport and JasperReport for reporting

JPivot for pivot table analysis

Kettle for ETL

Mondrian as an OLAP server

Quartz as a job scheduler

By using these products, Pentahoe gives a lot of choices for implementation in an enterprise environment.

Pentaho can be used as a standalone application or embedded into your application.

Standalone Application

Standalone includes integrated distribution includes the Pentaho code and a customized JBoss application server, a JBOSS Portal instance, and a built-in HSQL database. This distribution focuses on ease of use and out-of-the-box experience. To try the distribution, just download, unpack, start the application server, and point the browser to the default page. After completing these steps, you will have a complete, working reporting server.To create and edit reports, Pentaho uses another industry standard like Eclipse as an IDE for its Pentaho Design Studio. The Pentaho Design Studio provides an easy-to-use environment for generating new reports and Action Sequence components.The latest Pentaho stable release is 1.2 and the development version is 1.5.2. To learn more about Pentaho and its features refer the website at www.pentaho.org.In this chapter, we’ll cover the basics of installing and integrating Pentaho with our OSWorkflow Workflow instance database to create graphical charts that help the decision making process as well as the monitoring of business processes.

Embedded Application

Enbedded application includes pentaho in the application different application, such as CRM application or ERP application.

Pentaho Business Intelligence Requirements

Pentaho is a complex Java system, requiring a J2EE application server, thus the memory consumption is huge. If you want to edit the Pentaho components simultaneously, you need to have at least 1 GB of RAM in your system. If you don’t have this amount, you’ll have to alternate between editing and testing. Pentaho needs at least Java version 5 to run.