PentahoŽ Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL eBook: Roland Bouman, Jos van Dongen: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Product Description

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.

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

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

It's not just a great Pentaho book, it's an awesome reference for building BI applications. 18 Sep 2009

By Doug Moran

Format: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

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

Great book for a comprehensive application suite 12 Feb 2010

By M. S. Dathorne

This is a tremendous book to get an insight into the workings of the Pentaho application behemoth.

During my java development, I've found the need to use the excellent Pentaho Data Integration aka Kettle to transform data with great flexibility.

I bought this book to get a handle on the Pentaho Report Designer and the Pentaho BI server setup, not thinking I would need to touch much of the other stuff.
After a few weeks of getting to grips with the Report Designer, the requirements changed, we are now looking at using Pentaho Analysis Reports/Mondrian. Guess what, it's pretty much covered all you need to know to get started.
The Pentaho Analysis Reports will blow people away!
And that couple of chapters on data warehousing that I thought I didn't need, well I'm ploughing through that now!

The only section I have not properly touched yet is Data Mining but once you start to gain the knowledge imparted here, it's only a matter of time ...

If you're intending to check Pentaho out, then JUST GET THIS BOOK!

A good book - worth the money 6 Jan 2010

By M. Sear

I woudl not say this is a "great" book. To me it is very good but not a seminal work on BI. It is though I would say an essential purchase if you want to know anything about Pentaho and for that reason I would say buy it. The author clearly knows their stuff about BI and Pentaho in particular. Nice reference guide and nice initiation into Pentaho.