Book Image

Pentaho for Big Data Analytics

By : Manoj R Patil, Feris Thia
Book Image

Pentaho for Big Data Analytics

By: Manoj R Patil, Feris Thia

Overview of this book

<p>Pentaho accelerates the realization of value from big data with the most complete solution for big data analytics and data integration. The real power of big data analytics is the abstraction between data and analytics. Data can be distributed across the cluster in various formats, and the analytics platform should have the capability to talk to different heterogeneous data stores and fetch the filtered data to enrich its value.<br /><br />Pentaho Big Data Analytics is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with clear, step-by-step exercises for using Pentaho to take advantage of big data systems, where data beats algorithm, and gives you a good grounding in using Pentaho Business Analytics’ capabilities.<br /><br />This book looks at the key ingredients of the Pentaho Business Analytics platform. We will see how to prepare the Pentaho BI environment, and get to grips with the big data ecosystem through. The book provides a clear guide to the essential tools of Pentaho Business Analytics, providing familiarity with both the various design tools for setting up reports, and the visualization tools necessary for complete data analysis.</p>
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Pentaho for Big Data Analytics
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Data visualization and dashboard building


Before we begin discussing dashboard designer tools, it is best to clarify that only Pentaho EE has a preconfigured package to create a dashboard using an easy and user-friendly wizard with predefined templates and official support. Fortunately, there is an open source equivalent available—CTools. CTools is an additional plugin from Webdetails. Pentaho acquired Webdetails in 2013.

The following components are the parts of CTools that we will use:

  • CDF: This is a development framework for building a user-friendly dashboard layout and design

  • Community Data Access (CDA): This is a data connector to various data sources, and has a caching mechanism

  • CDE: This is a web editor plugin that simplifies the process of creating dashboards based on CTools components

  • Community Chart Components (CCC): This is a JavaScript charting library that acts as a visualization toolkit

CDE has the ability to create static or highly interactive chart components based on a layout...