Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL [Paperback]

Roland Bouman (Author), Jos van Dongen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0470484322 | ISBN-13: 978-0470484326 | Publication Date: August 31, 2009 | Edition: 1

Your all-in-one resource for using Pentaho with MySQL for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

Open-source Pentaho provides business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing solutions at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions. Now you can take advantage of Pentaho for your business needs with this practical guide written by two major participants in the Pentaho community.

The book covers all components of the Pentaho BI Suite. You'll learn to install, use, and maintain Pentaho-and find plenty of background discussion that will bring you thoroughly up to speed on BI and Pentaho concepts.

• Of all available open source BI products, Pentaho offers the most comprehensive toolset and is the fastest growing open source product suite
• Explains how to build and load a data warehouse with Pentaho Kettle for data integration/ETL, manually create JFree (pentaho reporting services) reports using direct SQL queries, and create Mondrian (Pentaho analysis services) cubes and attach them to a JPivot cube browser
• Review deploying reports, cubes and metadata to the Pentaho platform in order to distribute BI solutions to end-users
• Shows how to set up scheduling, subscription and automatic distribution

The companion Web site provides complete source code examples, sample data, and links to related resources.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Your one-stop resource for open source BI and data warehousing solutions

Pentaho is a full-featured, open source Business Intelligence suite that lets you build data warehouses and rich, powerful BI applications at a fraction of the cost of a proprietary solution. This book gets you up and running with Pentaho within minutes: right from the start you'll be running example reports, dashboards, and OLAP pivot tables while you learn about Pentaho concepts and architecture. Using a practical case study, you'll learn what dimensional modeling is and how to apply it to design a data warehouse. You'll create and populate your data warehouse with Pentaho data integration tools. Finally, you'll learn how to build your own BI applications on top of your data warehouse using Pentaho reporting, analysis, dashboarding, and data mining tools.

• Understand important Pentaho concepts, including action sequences and the solution repository

• Apply the key concepts of dimensional modeling and construct a data warehouse using star schemas

• Use Pentaho data integration tools to build ETL applications

• Explore advanced PDI features including remote execution and clustering

• Design and deploy reports and charts using Pentaho Report Designer

• Leverage OLAP and create interactive pivot tables with drill up/drill down using Pentaho Analysis Services

• Concentrate and compact BI content for business users with comprehensive dashboards

• Discover and explore patterns in your data using Pentaho data mining

About the Author

Roland Bouman is an application developer focusing on open source Web technology, databases, and Business Intelligence. He is an active member of the MySQL and Pentaho communities, and you can follow his blog at http://rpbouman.blogspot.com/.

Jos van Dongen is a seasoned Business Intelligence professional and well-known author and presenter. He speaks regularly at conferences and seminars. You can find more information about Jos at http://www.tholis.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 648 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (August 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470484322
• ISBN-13: 978-0470484326
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #94,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #29 in Books > Computers & Technology > Databases > Data Warehousing

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's not just a great Pentaho book, it's an awesome reference for building BI applications., September 3, 2009

By 

Doug Moran "Pentaho" (Merritt Island, FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL (Paperback)

Jos and Roland have done a great job explaining the tools and technology of the Pentaho BI Platform in the context of building real world Business Intelligence applications. They have taken some very complicated and technical concepts and presented them in an easy to follow case study. The case study they chose is simple to understand yet filled with the same kinds of real world complexities that make BI applications difficult to deliver.

The "Getting Started with Pentaho" section has all the information and documentation you wish you could find neatly arranged on the Pentaho community site. They do an excellent job explaining the entire Pentaho application stack from collecting data to presenting information. The book could have stopped here, being the Pentaho missing manual, and still have been worth buying.

The next section, "Dimensional Modeling and Data Warehouse Design" is an very good introduction/refresher on hows and whys of building data warehouses, data marts and OLAP cubes. Again they have taken a subject that is broad and complex and presented it in a way that is easy to understand and apply. Where appropriate, they refer the reader to other resources available for more in-depth coverage of specific topics.

A data warehouse is useless until you can reliably get good, complete and accurate data into it. The section on "ETL and Data Integration" is another section that could easily stand on it's own. After an introduction to ETL and Pentaho Data Integration, they show how to populate the database used for the case study including populating time dimensions. Other real world topics touched upon include; change data capture, data validation, data cleansing and issues with generating dimension tables.

The last section covers transforming data into information via metadata, reporting, analysis services, data mining and dashboards. Each topic is covered by an introduction, explanation of the tools available and examples using data from the case study.

I like the way Roland and Jos combine general BI knowledge with tutorials on the Pentaho applications and tie it all together with an interesting case study giving you a chance to stop and play as you follow along. I also enjoyed the many side notes with tidbits of history and pointers to other resources. Overall I found this book both informative and enjoyable.

I'm a fifteen year veteran of building BI software, one of the original Pentaho developers and am currently the Pentaho community guy. I'm not affiliated with Jos, Roland or Wiley and receive no benefit from this book beyond the satisfaction of having Pentaho software be so well represented.

Doug Moran
Pentaho

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars DW, BI and Pentaho in One Place, September 8, 2009

By 

J. A. DIPAOLANTONIO "JosephDP" (San Francisco Bay Area, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL (Paperback)

I've been involved with statistical analysis & algorithm creation for 30 years, DW/BI for 15, and Pentaho (the product, not the company) for 5 years.

Jos and Roland do an excellent job of presenting the possibilities of data warehousing, reporting and online analytical processing (OLAP) in general, and in the specific, using Pentaho and other open source tools, to build their teaching example. This would be an excellent text for a university course in data warehousing or data analytics.

This is more than a book about Pentaho, this is a wonderful introduction to the world of data warehouses, data marts, business intelligence, data mining and dashboards, using the open source Pentaho BI suite, and associated open source tools such as Power*Architect, to provide hands-on experience with the concepts being explained.

The first chapter dives right into showing the potential of these concepts, by having the reader download and install Pentaho BI Suite in its simplest configuration (right out of the virtual box), and then examine the examples of various types of reports, slice-and-dice (OLAP, Cubes, Pivot Tables) and dashboards that are included with the Pentaho download. Within a maximum of two hours, and for all of $31 (the current price on Amazon), one has a business intelligence solution running on their favorite computer, and should have their mind churning with all the things they can do beyond any spreadsheet, to capture, understand, analyze and share their new-found insights of the data with which they must work every day.

Any developer tasked with adding reporting, analysis and dashboards to their web-app or enterprise software, any business person who considers themselves a power user, and any student considering a career in statistics, business analysis or software development, should reward themselves with this book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book!!, September 20, 2009

By 

Abhishek Srivastava - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL (Paperback)

I have worked on Microsoft BI platform for a long time. I wanted to try out pentaho... but so many dependencies like Linux, MySQL, Tomcat etc were too much for me to handle. In my last attempt I couldn't even install the product.

However this book is so well written that even a person like me who doesn't know an iota of Linux/MySQL/Tomcat/Java was able to install and get up and running with a few hours of work.

The book introduces some tools which are very useful to everyone (like Power*Architect). The book explains Data warehousing and Pentaho tools very well. If someone wants to start PentahoBI then this is THE book to have.

Thanks to the authors for such a wonderful creation!