Rookie Pentaho review from an ETL veteran
November 02, 2016
Rookie Pentaho review from an ETL veteran
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pentaho
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.
- It's cheap. The version we have is free, so it has an immediate positive impact on ROI in that regard. However, a lot of our developers don't like it, which eats away our ability to be effective and productive.
- It gets the job done. It may not be the most elegant tool, but for our purposes it works. There are probably better tools out there, and Pentaho has limited capabilities, but at the end of the day it works well enough.
Pentaho is not as robust or as reputable as Microsoft ETL tools, but it is great for simpler ETL solutions. It has limitations and often lacks the ability for fine-tuning, but it gets the job done and is consistently reliable. Cheaper than other products, it's a great place to start for a company interested in creating a data warehouse.