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Business Intelligence - Part 1 Pentaho

Posted by admin in June 26th 2008

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Getting into Business Intelligent World

When I dig deeper in business intelligence, I found out that it is a huge topic ranging from reporting to data mining. Like all the knowledge acquisition plan, I put a series of milestones for myself. If you are interested, here is my list:

Get and prepare your data

Data collection - log processing, web services (SOAP and REST), RSS, screen scraping and more.
Data preparation and crunching - ETL (Kettle)
Data storage - data warehousing

Visualize your data

Reporting and Charting (Pentaho as server and Flex as frontend)

Analysis your data

Data modeling
Data analysis (OLAP)

Get smart of your data

Collective intelligence
Data mining

Introduction of Pentaho

Firstly, I want to see whether there is any out of the box open-source solution that captures what I am trying to do here. If so, I can reach my goal much faster. Yes. It has to be open-source b/c I don’t have $$ and I don’t want to be just a user. After doing my homework a bit, I found out an open-source BI tool named Pentaho that looks pretty solid. So, I decide to dive deep to this. Like all the tools I mess around with, I want to integrate Pentaho as library. However, I don’t find anything on the Net that shows me how to do it. I am looking into its download and checkout its pentaho-sample project. What it shows me is how to use their tools to create a report on their systems using their UI. I definitely need more!

After few days of efforts, I managed to pull out all the unnecessary dependencies from pentaho. The heart of Pentaho is its xaction interpreter. The approach Pentaho uses is to write adapters, plug into its framework and use xaction to wire them up in a workflow fashion. In fact, most of its functionalities come from other open-source projects like quartz for scheduling, shark for workflow engine and jfreereport for reporting. I don’t think their xaction is clean but I do like their architectural approach.

Enough talk, lets start! Here I would use series of articles to cut your learning curve and show you how to get yourself familiar with Pentaho as a developer rather than user. First thing first, follow the articles below to set up your environment.