Secured & Safest ETL and Reporting tool
I used Pentaho as an ETL tool to extract data from different data sources and created data marts for reporting and descriptive analytics …
Pentaho
Pentaho
Pentaho
Overview
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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Popular Features
View all 28 features- Multi-User Support (named login) (21)9.191%
- Role-Based Security Model (20)8.888%
- Formatting capabilities (20)8.484%
- Publish to PDF (20)7.777%
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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.
Pentaho Integrations
Pentaho Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
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 Responsive Design for Web Access highest, with a score of 9.6.
The most common users of Pentaho are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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March 16, 2015
Pentaho - Jumping On The Band Wagon
Pentaho is currently being used for several functions within my department. The Data Integration is used as our primary ETL tool. The software does a great job with data cleansing and standardizing from multiple sources. The tool is easy enough to learn using videos out on You Tube or using the Pentaho Kettle Solutions book. We also use the Schema Editor for creating the semantic layer in the User Console reporting tool. Having defined objects available in the User consoles makes it easy for a data analyst to quickly log in and quickly get a report together. We are in the healthcare industry so much of what is being asked is counts of patients, encounters by diagnosis, practice or time period. All these items can quickly be answered very quickly via the user console.
- A data analyst has quick access to data that would otherwise need to be pulled straight for the database. Additionally, the data dictionary is tied to an object so up keep is easy and users can scroll over the object to exactly what that measure or object represents.
- Report presentation is clean and professional. Pentaho comes with a pretty extensive set of charting and graphing functionality out of the box that in other tools would have to be developed. Easy file output with sufficient types available to choose from. (.pdf, .xlsx, .csv)
- The Data Integration tool is without question the best tool in the set. There is no limit to your transformation options. You can transform virtually any text file, excel file or script into a table, spreadsheet or even report. Many times we are given list of patients and file formats vary from practice to practice. With Pentaho DI we have the flexibility to take what has been provided and standardize.
- Pentaho could use some improvement of the integration of ldap into the User Console. We have unsuccessfully been able to deploy the Pentaho User Console to partners because it does not support a federated ldap model. Even attempts at integrating to our primary ldap has proven fruitless.
- The Pentaho Suite as a whole tends to be a resource hog. Since we work with such large data sets we often find that large requests hang up or get an "oops error" which is a standard Pentaho error when the data set is too large. It would be nice to have some indication of our limits so that we are not guessing or we can limit the data set up front.
- Upgrades on the Suite are a bit cumbersome for our Administrators. There is not a standard backup and install package so upgrades often involve our administrator on the phone with Pentaho during the upgrades to walk through a custom install.
In a past life I have used Business Objects which is a great product but requires an army of people to support. Pentaho can be managed by a smaller team of developers because you don't have to have expertise in Universe design, Report design and ETL. Pentaho's interfaces allow for a quick ramp up of the software and support all three areas pretty easily.
- Because of the security issue we have had to spin up an additional reporting portal using another vendor. This means we have two reporting tools that we must maintain and support.
- Since Pentaho is used by a limited audience it gets sidelined as a solution that requires our customers and partners to access their reporting via the web.
- Creation of reports via the User Interface are very easy. The interface offers a drag and drop method of pulling data together and filters are easily applied to create the data set needed. A fairly simple report can be completed in roughly 3-5 minutes.
- Adding new objects to the cube can be done through the Schema Editor. The User Interface offers a standard format
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.
We evaluated Panorama, Cognos, MicroSrategy, Jasper Reports, Talend and homegrown solutions. Though each were awesome in their own right, none of them provided a end to end integration like we wanted. Pentaho did the job for us and more. Knowing that Pentaho was built by a team who were industry veterans made us feel comfortable that the basics were always a given and that we could always reach out to them for more. Plus Pentaho's responsiveness in providing a hands on expert to train us was a huge plus.
10
Managers, System Analysts and Business Analysts. We provide financial analytics hence the users are somewhat tech savvy, know how to use the system and get meaningful information from it to complete their day to day activities. Some users use our product for strategic planning purposes such as budgeting and marketing spend.
5
Java is a must have. Somebody who is proficient with object oriented programming concepts, understands APIs.
ETL Developer. Must have hands on experience coding ETL using SQL and/or proprietary tools.
Report Developer. Must have experience with building reports with Excel, Business Objects et al.
Solutions Engineer. Must understand how Pentaho fits with the overall Product offering. Should have the customer in mind at all times during product integration.
ETL Developer. Must have hands on experience coding ETL using SQL and/or proprietary tools.
Report Developer. Must have experience with building reports with Excel, Business Objects et al.
Solutions Engineer. Must understand how Pentaho fits with the overall Product offering. Should have the customer in mind at all times during product integration.
- As a replacement for our costly and technically disparate ETL and data visualization solution.
- As a integration software for our transactional systems with our BI systems.
- As a workflow management, business process specific application system.
- As a dashboard/reporting solution.
- As a end to end data integrator. Right from data ingestion to pretty pictures that provide business value and decision making capability.
- As a workflow management solution.
No
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
Integration. That Pentaho had ETL, reporting, scheduling, workflow management included in one software plus being Java based it could be easily integrated with our existing software stack was the most important factor in choosing Pentaho.
I would place high marks on the visualization layer. If I cannot use one aspect of a Product suite it becomes difficult to evangelize the product within an organisation. Or I would set internal expectations that though the Product offers various modules, our evaluation should restrict itself to 2-3 core ideas and evaluate accordingly.
- Implemented in-house
Yes
We first chose the reporting solution as a module to integrate. Via API calls this module was integrated with our existing Product for transactional reporting purposes. Next phase of our implementation was centered around integrating the ETL solution into our product as a single point of data ingestion mechanism. Once the data was brought in using Schema Workbench we built the logical layer to help publish dashboards/reports via the Pentaho BI Server.
- Technical expertise. Finding the right people who understood Java and BI was a tough ask. So we decided to keep the teams separate and let a Solutions Engineer/Architect provide direction for the integration.
- The team had prior experience in using stable proprietary products where documentation was plenty and hence any issue could be solved easily by tapping into the knowledge base around. Customer support interactions were infrequent. With Pentaho it was vice versa, where we depended more on Customer support than on community knowledge.
Yes
For any production related issues where a hotfix is the only way to go.
For any configuration related issues where best practices are known but are not working as expected.
For any configuration related issues where best practices are known but are not working as expected.
Yes
Some bugs were resolved whereas some were slated in a much later release.
- End to end data ingestion to data visualization is easiest to do.
- Dashboard/report creation, distribution is easy too.
- Workflow integration is best used in Pentaho. You can schedule an invoice to be loaded as soon as it arrives in your ftp server, you can apply business rules, load it to your database, refresh the data warehouse with this latest invoice and finally burst an email with telling all users to go and see the report. All this can be achieved in Pentaho's Workflow integration tool.
- You HAVE to know Java to use Pentaho to the best of its capability. For pure BI enabled users like myself, it was a steep learning curve.
- Trying to match Customers data visualization expectations was tough, Our customers had already used Tableau and/or Microstrategy/Cognos/Business Objects, hence it was always a tough ask to match/better what they had already seen and experienced.
Yes, but I don't use it