Pentaho Reviews

The Pentaho Data Integration ETL tool runs successfully on systems derived from both Windows and Unix. When designing a data warehouse, we can create ETL packets both at the Stage layer and at the DWH layer. There are many components for ETL design. We can run packages at certain time intervals through the Windows Task Scheduler. Since Pentaho Data Integration is an open-source application, it can be developed in applications to be integrated with PDI (Pentaho Data Integration). This allows you to manage the scheduler process through a separate application.

Making custom dashboards and custom reports are very simple with CDE and the rest of the tools in the Pentaho suite. The improvement in decision making since we have implemented these dashboards is huge. The tool is not very difficult for a programmer with JavaScript knowledge, perhaps it lacks the robustness of payment tools such as MicroStrategy or PowerBI, but it is still appropriate for demanding production environments.

Pentaho is well suited for bringing together data from multiple data sources in order to perform analyses and to create reports.

If you want to create very nicely looking interactive graphs using the latest web technologies, there might be other tools that are more suited. We have also seen performance problems with large amounts of data, but it is not certain if this only was the fault of Pentaho but could also be the infrastructure around.

Pentaho will work great to embed analytic content with full features of Machine Learning capabilities. It supports many machine-learning frameworks and can be easily integrated. So, you also can connect with many data sources and have no worries about it. In our case, we are using it to help us create many day-to-day jobs and transformations that our internal users need. But to achieve this, we need to train our team to be able to understand the main concepts of how this software works.

Well suited scenarios: When we need to deal with any type of RDBMS, from data input to the data loading, Pentaho is super fast. It has many bulk loaders available too. Dealing with the tables is the specialty of Pentaho.

Less Appropriate scenarios: When you have a star schemas with the bridge tables or snow-flake schemas, you will need a lot of additional work to be done in Pentaho apparently. Also, dealing with the files is not bad, but it should be improved.
** My review is for Pentaho 5.4.0.8 or previous releases.

Open sourced ETL tool to help corporations load data. Very easy to learn but you have to take the time to do it! Lots of reading and exploring by yourself and there are some free jobs and transformations online to help you get started. However, we have heard and seen cases with the jobs just do not load the data entirely; it'll have issues after 50K records.

As far as generating and maintaining a data warehouse, Pentaho does an excellent job and I would highly recommend it. For analysis and gaining insight into your data, Pentaho is excellent. For visualization, dashboarding, or executive grade reporting it may not be as beautiful or flashy as your clients require.

Pentaho is well suited for ETL processing and database population. It is less appropriate for visualization and analytics. Key question is the benefit it can bring and the cost and robustness.

Pentaho is very well suited for organizations looking for end-to-end BI solutions without wanting to break the bank--particularly because the community edition has most of the functionality necessary to get you started, and it's free. Honestly though, if you have deep pockets there are probably more complete solutions out there in terms of functionality

Pentaho is an excellent tool for start ups and where CTOs are willing to invest in staff training

Drawback : Takes a bit longer to master Pentaho in relation to the leading BI solutions.

If you are an open-source shop, this is a great choice. Also, if your developer has minimal experience with ETL, Pentaho is a great way to go wince it is easy to use. There is also a ton of help in the forums, in you go with Community Edition (i.e. sans support)

The tool is fast, visually attractive and intuitive to use, but we also have an implementation of Qlik Sense and Pentaho pales in comparison to the overall capabilities. I recommend the tool, but everyone’s solution need is unique, so it may not be the right fit. Larger tools like Qlik are more versatile and easier to recommend. More expensive, yes, but you usually get what you pay for.

PDI is a great alternative to proprietary tools. If your environment is just starting out using ETL tools, definitely look into using PDI. The number of features plus the ability to write flexible dynamic processes allows for much more maintainable code.

Pentaho is well suited for an internal environment who needs access to data quickly and offer the data up in a very professional business document. It is not suited for a reporting portal that customers can access via the internet or web. The limited security prevents us from being able to offer our Pentaho UI as a service to our partners and customers.

Do you need to integrate data from multiple sources? Pentaho is great for this. Previously, we were SSHing files around and importing with numerous cron scripts.

Are your Finance and Marketing teams constantly asking for one-off queries? Pentaho puts this power in THEIR hands so they can pull and arrange the data they want into whatever view they want.

Do you want to pay too much for a full-featured BI solution? Pentaho is very reasonably priced, and even has a free version!

Integration is best with Pentaho. If you want to overlay your product capability with Pentaho's BI Server, Data Integration, Reporting Engine, Workflow capabilities then Pentaho is the only answer. Other tools provide each of these very well, but if you have already built your product and dont want to buy Informatica, Cognos/Microstratey and SPSS/SAS then Pentaho is the way to go.
Pentaho is Java based, so no shortage of skilled Java resources who can help you integrate. We did not spend time building our own reporting engine, Data Visualization layer, Security layer, workflow capabilities. We simply used our proven transactional product and used Pentaho to fill our gaps.

Pentaho is great for companies that don't have huge budgets but want a powerful reporting tool that they can get and use for free. It is great for developers that know SQL and can learn to use a non-intuitive interface and are motivated to work through a very outdated interface.

Pros:
I find it suited for 90% of data integration projects , its a very good tool, easy to use, stable and affordable.
Cons:
I think that the big data connections are still not perfect, so if you have a NoSQL DBl / Hadoop / Cassandra, you might consider extracting the data to file from the source using MapReduce. Also, if you need bulk load, sometimes it's better to use it directly on a tool, for example Redshift / InfiniDB (that is no longer with us).
Apart than that I think it will suit you well.

I would definitely recommend the ETL tool but not the server. I would consider the amount of data to be processed, the budget the client is looking to spend, available knowledge and expertise. it seems that there are not that many Pentaho skills on the market and companies are reluctant to implement the product as they are concerned about ongoing maintenance. I would also ask about requirements to integrate with other products or run on the cloud. Being open standards Pentaho integrates nicely with in-house systems.

Pentaho provides a rich end to end BI solution. It is highly configurable. The data integration module is an especially useful and powerful. You may need a higher level of IT skills and support to work with Pentaho than you do with other BI tools. It is helpful to have SQL querying skills when creating Penthao reports. Make sure you have resources who are familiar with Pentaho or are able to get training.

Overall as an OEM vendor of analytics, I would say it was about average. They did help us get to market sooner than if we developed everything in-house, but I felt the dashboards were pretty ugly and I wouldn't say I was super impressed. I found the Analyzer OLAP tool to be very useful and that part would have been harder to develop in-house, but I would skip the dashboards next time and go straight to developing those in-house, which is what we ended up with in the end.

It is well suited for developers who may not be adept at strict coding, but have experience with GUI development. It is also better for rather simpler ETL, as the GUI interface has natural restrictions that make complex ETL problems challenging to solve. It may also be well suited for companies on a budget, as the free version still has enough features to be reasonably useful.

Pentaho is well suited to small - mid size firms that have specific reporting needs. It is less likely to benefit firms that already have data analytics capabilities built into multiple platforms as Pentaho is not easy to integrate with other analytics platforms. There isn't enough documentation available online, however, customer support is easy to reach.

There are different Pentaho features, and each one has its own specific scenario where it is best suited. Reporting - is for generating boring Excel like reports, with calculations etc. For data visualization reporting is not a [good] tool. PDI is used for creation data transformations, from almost any source of data. But it is very heavy weighted. It has Hadoop and other support. But hand made code runs faster than transformation made in Spoon. And there are some algorithms that can be much easily written manually.