A Project Report on Pentaho Business Intelligence

Academic Session 2011-13

INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY

Subject: MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM

Submitted By: Aabhas Rastogi 11DCP053 Abhishek Gupta 11DCP055 Nikhar Gupta 11DCP084 Paras Arora 11DCP086

Introduction Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition allows you to deploy the world s most popular open source BI suite with confidence, security, and far lower total cost of ownership than proprietary alternatives. Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition provides additional capabilities including a comprehensive professional technical support program, software maintenance, enhanced software functionality, certified software, product expertise, and the best software assurance program in the industry .The Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition extends Pentaho s best-in-class open source business intelligence (BI) capabilities with additional software and services designed to help you and your organization: y Achieve BI success y Save time, resources, and money y Mitigate risk

The Pentaho BI Platform is a Web-based framework that leverages elements of Pentaho Analysis and Pentaho Reporting to provide easy-to-use tools for creating and sharing Pentaho Analyzer reports, ad hoc reports, and dashboards. It is the heart of the BI Suite, which also includes powerful software to prepare your data and create detailed reports. The BI Platform Enterprise Edition includes two graphical user interfaces: The Pentaho User Console, which helps you discover patterns, trends, and other hidden information about your data; and the Pentaho Enterprise Console, which gives sysadmins, IT managers, CIOs, and database administrators fine-grained control over every aspect of BI Platform configuration, management, and security. This major release gives power to the user with new interactive reporting, rich data discovery capabilities, and a completely redesigned user interface. Pentaho now delivers dramatic progress in the ability for business users to access, report, and analyze data from more sources, more easily, and quicker than ever before.

The Challenges of Business Intelligence

There are multiple problems encountered by the traditional approach to BI projects.These problems can be grouped into categories: People and skills required Many projects never start because the number and diversity of the people required is too great. Lack of iterations Many projects fail because the initial prototype, if done at all,is the only iteration of requirements and design. Suitability of the tools The usability and productivity of the existing BI tools are impediments for many BI projects, as are the hardware requirements for the combined tool set. Costs The pricing and licensing of BI Software and the cost of the necessary hardware increases the risk of undertaking a BI project.

Pentaho Reporting Pentaho Reporting is a suite of tools for creating pixel perfect reports. With Pentaho Reporting you are able to transform data into meaningful information tailored to your audience. You can create HTML, Excel, PDF, Text or printed reports. If you are a developer, you can also produce CSV and XML reports to feed other systems. Pentaho Reporting's development is driven by the goal to create a flexible yet simple to use reporting engine. Using the reporting engine gives you unmatched flexibility to create reports that adapt to your data as almost every property can be computed during report generation. Your reports can include data from virtually any data-source due to Pentaho Reporting's large selection of data-sources, including SQL-databases, OLAP data sources and even the Pentaho Data-Integration ETL tool. With high performance at low memory consumption the report processing can scale from small footprint embedded scenarios to large-scale enterprise reporting scenarios. Pentaho Reporting integrates perfectly with the Pentaho BI-Server to share your reports with your co-workers and peers.
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Level of difficulty for business users to use, execute, interact with: Easy -> Medium Level of difficulty for developer to create: Easy --> Medium No training is necessary for business users to execute and understand At the minimum, report queries and report layout defintions are created using the Pentaho Report Designer Uses standard RDBMS table structures A developer usually develops the query and the report definition (layout,structure) in the Pentaho Report Designer The query can be a SQL or Stored Procedure (JNDI), MQL, XQuery, or Mondrian MDX query You can create summary and detail level reports and link them together via drill downs and parameter passing via hyper-linking or style expressions

Summary and Detail reports need to be published to BI Server and then linked together - you need to know the URL of the detail report and its parms to pass Can have additional parameters added if necessary to change the structure of the report as well as filters Developer creating a drill down to detail from the summary report, needs to know the detail report action sequence name, the proper URL to call and the parameter names to pass Can be emailed or distributed in a number of different means by editing the published action sequences with Pentaho Design Studio Can be customized to desired look and feel very easily using the Pentaho Report Designer Normally the structure of report is relatively left unchanged but can be made dynamic with certain design techniques used for Guided Ad hoc Can be used as Structured or Guided Ad hoc report templates by utilizing parametrized Pentaho Report Definitions and parametrized action sequences

Ad Hoc Reporting

Pentaho Report Designer is the most comprehensive report design tool in the Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition, but for preliminary report exploration or to generate a report quickly use the ad hoc report wizard built into the platform. Ad hoc reporting helps you quickly identify and group interesting and relevant data, apply constraints to it, and generate a report. The resulting reports are viewable through the built-in preview feature; through a Pentaho Reporting-based Web application; or as a standalone PDF, XLS, CSV, or HTML file. The processes performed are: 1) Creating a new Ad Hoc report. 2) Editing an existing report. 3) Running the Ad Hoc repor

Analyzer Reporting Pentaho Analyzer report



 

Pentaho Analysis models need to be created by BI Admins using the Schema Workbench or PDI Agile BI method. Pentaho Analysis models use standard RDBMS table structures accessed through the native JDBC RDBMS driver The RDBMS Data structure is commonly in a fact / dimension data model star schema, however single tables can be used MDX is used as the underlying query language and is dynamically created using the Pentaho Analyzer you do not need to know MDX but can use it if needed Business models are accessed by users easily in the Pentaho User Console using the Analyzer Report tool View and structure is completely dynamic by using the Pentaho Report Analyzer Filters are completely dynamic Drilling, navigating hierarchies, sorting, ranking, pivoting, filtering, charting, calculating and exporting.

The processes performed are: 1) Creating a new Analyzer report. 2) Enhancing an Analyzer report. 3) Adding Filters to Analyzer report. 4) Adding Query parameters to Analyzer report. 5) Exporting the Analyzer report. 6) Filtering by member properties. 7) Configuring drill down links.

Pentaho Report Designer The Pentaho Report Designer is the primary design tool to create report definitions. Its state of the art user interface allows you to spell out your data

flow in the report and to define the visual appearance of your report. With the Pentaho Report Designer you are able to create pixel perfect reports quick and efficiently. The Pentaho Report Designer offers complete access to all settings and configuration options of the Pentaho Reporting Engine. Its high number of possibilities and extreme flexibility can make it overwhelming to novice users. The Pentaho Report Designer is aimed at technically skilled power users Pentaho Reporting Engine The Pentaho Reporting Engine is the underlying technology that creates the reports from your report definitions. The Pentaho Reporting Engine is used both in the Pentaho Report Designer and the Pentaho BI-Platform to drive the report generation. Pentaho BI-Server The Pentaho BI-Server is a web-application for sharing and managing reports. With the BI-Platform you are able to make report available to a wider audience. You can automatically send reports by E-Mail to a list of recipients via a process called "bursting". You can schedule large reports to run at nighttime so that you get up-to-date information in the morning. Pentaho Reporting Web Viewer

The Pentaho Reporting Web Viewer is a web-based application that allows direct access to Pentaho Reports (*.prpt) saved within content repository of the Pentaho BI Server. It can be decomposed into two sections: the report prompt and the rendered report content. The report prompt leverages the power of Pentaho CDF to dynamically create a collection of input controls for users to change report parameters values for a given report. The prompting piece of the equation is implemented as part of the Pentaho Common UI project. This JavaScript API allows the developer to build a

collection of input components that work together to provide prompts for the parameters defined in a Parameter XML Specification.

Demonstration of our working on Pentaho

Dashboards By delivering key performance indicators in a highly graphical visual interface, Pentaho dashboards gives business users the critical information they need to understand and improve organizational performance. Rich graphical visualizations with navigation, drilling and a rich library of filter control y Web-based drag and drop dashboard designer for business users y Portal and mash-up integration to seamlessly integrate business analytics with other applications, including Google Maps
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Few of the important features and attributes of a Dashboard are: y y y y y Modification of the external aspects of Graphs and charts Query Editor Adding templates and filtering the required data to be viewed Linking up with the browser Viewing and Exporting reports

Pentaho Professional Open Source Advantages y Open Source Licensing Software code is free Dramatically lower up-front and ongoing costs y Superior relationship Complete transparency Relationship based 100% on quality of customer support No vendor lock in simply based on access to future upgrades y Reduced risk Delivering whole product using an open source core support, training, documentation, global partner network, consulting, product management, quality assurance, longevity y Enterprise Development Methodology Innovative, enterprise-quality products via a professional methodology

Superior development productivity and commercial quality via extensive QA Continuous testing in diverse environments by a huge global community Transparent, detailed roadmap Product roadmap, core development, and project contributions managed by Pentaho y Enterprise Support Methodology Delivered via Subscription Service 9 X 5 or 24 X 7 20% of Core Developers time allocated to delivering Services Pentaho Architectural Advantages y 100% J2EE server-side application for scalability, manageability, integration y Lack of legacy architectural issues, acquisition baggage , or cumbersome migrations y Aggressive support of open standards wherever available J2EE, JDBC, MDX, SQL, JSR-170, etc. y Designed for embeddability and Service-Oriented-Architectures (SOA) not a monolithic, hardwired y stack exposed via a thin web services layer y Componentized and modular for flexibility and easy customization y Completely exposed via AJAX and Web Services.

Conclusion The Pentaho Business Intelligence Project provides a comprehensive Business Intelligence suite and comprises of various tools such as reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, and a BI platform necessary for true production deployment. The Pentaho Business Intelligence provides superior relationship and complete transparency with the client Many other projects that exist address a specific function like reporting, but not the entire BI spectrum. Most also lack the necessary infrastructure like security, administration, auditing, fail-over, scalability features, portal, and other key framework functionality.

Beyond that, some projects offer open source reporting, but require an upgrade to an expensive, closed-source offering for web-based deployment or other BI platform functionality.