The previous two chapters took us through the Pentaho User Console's user interface. We covered the common use cases of user's activities in depth, and we showed new ways to accomplish administrative tasks through the new Administration perspective.
This chapter introduces data sources and how to define them in a new Pentaho BA Server user interface. Data sources are the natural entry points to each and every possible source of data that can fill our BI objects (reports, analysis views, dashboards, or others).
Pentaho BA Server is a J2EE web application. In any Java application, an application's connection to a database is made through a JDBC connection. Basically, a JDBC connection is a way for a Java application to communicate with an RDBMS database by means of a driver (the JDBC driver) and a set of connection information, such as server URL username and password. In our Pentaho Business Analytics Server, any components such as reports, OLAP cubes, and dashboards are filled...