You've heard of Pentaho, as well as terms like Kettle, Mondrian and Weka. But what do they all mean? This page is meant to give you an idea.
Reporting
Pentaho reports are run from the Pentaho BI platform. There are two ways to create reports to run on the BI platform. The method which provides the most control is to use Report Designer to create a report template, which is coupled with an appropriate action sequence and uploaded and run from the BI server. A simpler, less customizable way to create reports is to use the ad hoc reporting tool (WAQR) to create a report directly from the BI server.
Pentaho Projects
The Pentaho suite of BI tools grew out of the following four open source projects.
- Kettle
- Also known as Pentaho Data Integration, this is Pentaho's set of ETL tools.
- Mondrian
- This is Pentaho's OLAP tool for analyzing data cubes. (It's named after the cubist painter Piet Mondrian, get it?)
- Reporting Engine
- Tools for designing and distributing reports.
- Weka
- Pentaho's data mining suite. It rhymes with "Mecca."
Documentation
The Pentaho documentation is somewhat sparse, but most questions can be answered by checking the documentation that ships with the package, the Pentaho wiki, and the Pentaho forums, in that order.
- Documentation package
- The documentation included with the software. Much of this comes from the wiki (below).
- Pentaho wiki
- This is where the official Pentaho documentation is posted.
- Pentaho forums
- The last resort for your Pentaho questions.
Some Pentaho blogs
Read how people are using the tools.
- Nicholas Goodman on Business Intelligence
- Musings on reporting, OLAP, ETL, open source
- Matt Casters on Data Integration
- Some interesting notes on Kettle.
- Michael Tarallo
- Director of Pre-Sales Engineering at Pentaho
by bpeirce
Benjamin Peirce is Business Intelligence Lead at RedBrick Health, a health services startup in Minneapolis, MN. (more)
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