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Pentaho has proven to be a valuable tool for users across a range of industries and business functions. Users have found value in using …
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What is Pentaho?
Pentaho is a suite of open source business intelligence and analytics products, now offered and supported by Hitachi Data Systems since the June 2015 acquisition.
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What is Pentaho?
Pentaho is a suite of open source business intelligence and analytics products, now offered and supported by Hitachi Data Systems since the June 2015 acquisition.
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SAP Lumira Discovery is SAP’s data visualization and discovery application. It facilitates data discovery, visualization, and analysis by assisting users with creation of dashboards, infographics, presentations, data facets, tag clouds, and more.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Pentaho is a suite of open source business intelligence and analytics products, now offered and supported by Hitachi Data Systems since the June 2015 acquisition.
Reviewers rate Report Delivery Scheduling and Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete) highest, with a score of 9.9.
The most common users of Pentaho are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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Pentaho has proven to be a valuable tool for users across a range of industries and business functions. Users have found value in using Pentaho for building data warehouses for data migration and analytics, covering all scenarios and allowing the use of external jars for unsupported activities. Pentaho's BI stack is utilized for ETL, report delivery, and as an endpoint for custom web apps. It offers ease of learning and impressive functionality, making it a popular choice for small-size private consulting firms. Pentaho is also used by engineering departments to create data warehouse environments for multiple customers, enabling analytics usage. In addition, it serves as the primary source for Business Intelligence in many companies, used by multiple users for creating reports and evaluating work across different teams. The software's ability to handle large and complex data sets with ease has been highly regarded by users, along with its advanced features for data integration, reporting, and analytical dashboards. Overall, Pentaho meets various needs such as scheduled ETL processes, data ingestion, reporting and dashboard development, making it a flexible solution across organizations.
Wide range of tools and features: Users appreciate the flexibility of Pentaho, as it offers a wide range of tools and features that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of different users and organizations. This has been mentioned by multiple reviewers who found this feature highly customizable and easy to learn.
Excellent reporting tool: Pentaho is praised for being an excellent reporting tool, with features like data reporting, integration, data mining, and ETL. Users find it intuitive and easy to use, even for advanced users. The visual interface simplifies processes that would traditionally require writing lines of code. Many reviewers have highlighted this aspect as one of the strengths of Pentaho.
Highly accessible data integration module: Pentaho's Data Integration module is highly regarded for its maturity and ease of learning. It allows business users to quickly connect to almost any data source. The ability to preview data in a pivot view format enables early data analysis. Several users have mentioned this module as a valuable feature in their reviews.
Limited Data Visualization Capabilities: Users have expressed the need for Pentaho to improve its data visualization capabilities in order to enhance the end result of dashboards. Specifically, some users feel that the current options are limited and lack advanced features and customization.
Difficulties with Mondrian-based ROLAP: Some users have mentioned that the Mondrian based ROLAP capability does not scale up well when analyzing data for a large number of subscribers over different time periods. This has resulted in performance issues and challenges in meeting the needs of complex business requirements.
Lack of Support and Guidance for WEKA: Users believe that WEKA, the machine learning platform used by Pentaho, lacks use cases in production environments and requires more support and guidance. They have found it challenging to implement and fully leverage the potential of WEKA within their organizations due to limited resources and documentation.
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Reviews
(1-8 of 8)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 04, 2022
Data integration made easy
Pentaho is used in my organization, mainly by the IT team, creating processes and routines focused on data ingestion from many sources. We also use Pentaho to create complex ETL jobs and prepare data to be used in our data warehouse and reporting platforms that are used by other departments in the company.
- Data Integration with (almost) any source
- ETL jobs
- Manage and scheduling recurrent process
- Report development could be easier
- Better integration with online repository
- Native deployment and development environments
May 07, 2021
Using the Pentaho tools to solve ETL challenges
Before working for Hitachi Vantara, I had experience using the Pentaho Tools for personal projects mainly. I had the chance to work directly with the teams that supported the Pentaho tools, and I can tell with much objectivity that the Pentaho tools are by far one of the best options in the market when it comes to all the ETL processes. Data science requires extracting data from different sources, organizing it, and transforming it according to each necessity. Machine learning is built on top of these concepts, and with the Pentaho tools, you can accomplish most of it. Since I supported the Pentaho tools while working for Hitachi Vantara, my perspective is kind of unique; I can tell that the tools were used to solve internal problems such as integrations with our release tools and some of our agile tools, so the tools were used to enhance the newer versions.
Solving problems such as extracting metadata from thousands of files, organizing this information, and filtering it to create release files, determining how to create meta information files is just an example of the ETL cycle that can be performed with the Pentaho tools.
Solving problems such as extracting metadata from thousands of files, organizing this information, and filtering it to create release files, determining how to create meta information files is just an example of the ETL cycle that can be performed with the Pentaho tools.
- Open source, the Pentaho tools have a free to use version with a lot of support.
- Performance. The Pentaho tools can be setup so they process gigabytes of data seamlessly.
- Support from the open source developer community.
- Documentation up-to-date.
- The web versions of the Pentaho tools are limited to the server component.
- Worker nodes features are being improved but more documentation and support is always welcome.
March 19, 2018
Pentaho for your business
Currently, Pentaho was using it for our internal IT Department. We are using Pentaho to address more specific needs to integrate and analyze the company data that resides on all systems. It is necessary to have a secondary system that runs for the same purpose to run small and simpler modeling tools for Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence. It also acts as a comparison system to build simple jobs and transformations.
- Easy to create simple jobs and transformations
- Mature data access and data transformation capabilities
- Suitable for complex analytic use cases
- Consume data from many sources
- At first, one needs to learn the basic concept of this software before going for the implementation. Once you are an expert on this then you will rock it.
- Some of the basic features need to be enhanced such as sharing and collaboration capabilities
- Needs to support automatically generated analytic visualizations or models
November 04, 2016
Pentaho - Yay or Nay?
I worked in a small-size private consulting firm that used Pentaho for analytics and reporting firm-wide. It catered to clients in a broad range of industries ranging from hospitality to the public sector. The software is easy to learn and has an impressive amount of functionality incorporated. The ETL (Kettle) module is great for generating visualizations and I highly recommend this software to a beginner interested in BI.
- User friendly interface
- Easy and quick report generation
- Great report customizing features
- Heavy software to install
- Requires licensing to enable all features
- Difficult to integrate with other servers
November 02, 2016
Rookie Pentaho review from an ETL veteran
In my organization, we use Pentaho as our go-to ETL tool. It is used by our engineering department in order to create our data warehouse environment, which is used by several customers. It allows us to create our data warehouse, which ultimately enables our end users to utilize analytics for their environments.
- Great visualizations. Much like SSIS, the component-based model of ETL is easy to see at-a-glance in order to understand what is going on.
- Easy roll-ups. It is very easy to encapsulate logic into separate jobs (KJBs) and transforms (KTRs), in order to group code into bite-size chunks.
- Wide selection of tools. There are several dozen ETL steps to choose from, in a variety of different categories. Everything from file management to XML and scripting.
- Lack of support. Unlike many Microsoft products, there is not a great wealth of support out there for Pentaho on the web. It is much harder to track down solutions.
- Non-intuitive. There is a learning curve, and there are subtle nuances to Pentaho that even experienced ETL developers will take a while to get used to.
- Less reputable. Despite all of Pentaho's benefits, it just hasn't gotten to that critical mass in the marketplace. Thus it does not garner as much respect as Microsoft or Oracle, which in turn makes it harder to find online support. It's a vicious cycle.
February 23, 2016
Pentaho powerful backend BI tooling, hit-and-miss data visualization
We utilize the Community Edition of Pentaho across our organization for business intelligence. We use Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) to gather data from disparate data sources and perform ETL to populate our data warehouse. We also use PDI to deliver custom reports to various internal and external clients. We use Mondrian as a data engine behind our customer-facing website to process MDX queries from our customer reporting portal. We use Pentaho Report Designer to author pixel-perfect reports for internal and external audiences. We also use the Pentaho User Console for our business analysts to slice-and-dice the data for various departments. In summary, Pentaho is used to allow our internal and external clients to benchmark the performance of our products and services and gain visibility into customer behavior and activity.
- Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), which is Pentaho's ETL tool, is a powerful visual scripting tool. It is a very mature ETL tool that can process large quantities of data quickly when provided with appropriate hardware.
- Pentaho Analyzer which is Pentaho's Enterprise browser-based analysis and pivot table tool is powerful and intuitive. When provided with a well defined data warehouse schema it is easy for even non-technical users to quickly generate reports and graphs.
- Pentaho allows you to connect to virtually any datasource provided there exists a JDBC connector, REST API, or some other API end point.
- Pentaho has an open-source Community Edition which provides much of the functionality of the Enterprise Edition without any licensing fees.
- A major problem we have had with Pentaho is their enterprise licensing. As a client who understands very well what is offered within the free Community Edition we felt their mark up on their enterprise features was much too high. They wanted to charge us for migrating from MySQL to Amazon RedShift since RedShift is an "analytical database" while nearly every other database could be connected to for free. Due to licensing concerns we terminated our enterprise license.
- Pentaho's visualization tools are very capable, but have a very steep learning curve and engineering cost. Due to this we ended switching from Pentaho for the majority of our internal dashboarding and reporting to purchasing Tableau licenses. If Pentaho could improve their visualization and dashboarding capabilities, they could truly be an end-to-end BI solution.
November 04, 2014
Pentaho the best BI integrator
Our product intended to analyse Media and Communications data and provide decision making capabilities to our end users. Whereas we built the workflow management, transactional capabilities, Pentaho provided the BI layer for our product. Analysts were our end users. Everything from data ingestion to decision making was the scope of our product. We read data across disparate data sources/formats and using our business expertise provided decision making capability.
- Data Integration. Pentaho wins hands down. You can read huge data using a Hadoop process, do your encirchment, load it to a Netezza database afterwards, finally input the data to your WEKA model to predict which Customer will churn or what offer should be made to the customer so that he/she stays put.
- BI Server. If you want to schedule a data read operation of your clickstream data, to finally burst out recommendations of next best actions to end users, Pentaho's BI Server performs this integration seamlessly.
- Mondrian. This layer provides Cube based Hierarchical data modeling on the front end and at the back end converts this OLAP structure to a ROLAP, SQL based model. Hence any relational database becomes a ROLAP engine seamlessly.
- Data Visualization. Provide richer library of data visualization capabilities. Ultimately the dashboards are the end result of all the hard work done at the back office. Yes, Pentaho has a lower TCO compared to other Products but richer data visualization capabilities would make it a winner! Pentaho has overcome this limitation by allowing external charting engines to be integrated with their product suite, but more needs to be done to strengthen core Pentaho Data Visualizaiton capabilities. Alternatively the external charting engine capabilities need to be documented and evangalized.
- Alternative to Mondrian. In our case we needed to analyse data for a million subscribers over key performance areas like Churns, Activations etc. In these scenarios semi additive measures needed to be calculated and presented in a report across days to years grains of time. In such scenarios the Mondrian based ROLAP capability did not scale up to our expectation. Pentaho needs to address such issues and fast.
- In the world of R/SAS/SPSS its hard to find use cases where WEKA was used in Production environments to solve a business problem. We would have needed some hand holding to replace our R/SPSS code to WEKA and help us build newer alogorithms on this platform ground up.
November 04, 2014
Pentaho: a strong open source BI suite
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho Data Integration was used for a variety of data integration projects, including populating a dimensional data warehouse. Data sources included relational data bases, flat files, and LDAP directories. Pentaho Reporting served reports from a range of data sources to multiple departments with security integrated with Active Directory. The Mondrian OLAP engine delivered pivot tables for slice and dice analysis.
- The Pentaho Data Integration tool is extremely versatile. I find it easier to use than comparable tools like SSIS.
- The reporting engine delivers reports in multiple formats, including Excel and PDF.
- It is easy for users to subscribe to reports for delivery by email.
- The report parameterization is very flexible, and I find it easier to use and more versatile than parameterization in Crystal.
- If using the community edition, be prepared to invest some effort in learning the product. Documentation can be vague.
- The new pivot table viewer is part of the enterprise edition. Fortunately there is a nice open source plug in called Saiku that can replace the old, difficult to use jPivot pivot table interface.
- I wish there were easier ways to audit user activity, especially to see which items have not been accessed for a long time and could be retired.
- There are not as many people who know how to use Pentaho in the market as there are people proficient in other BI tools. There is a learning curve and design patterns are not necessarily the same from one BI tool to the next.