Pentaho has become one of the most commonly used open source BI platforms during the last few years. In recent times, a lot of different books came out that covered topics on the Pentaho platform, but none of these gave a complete overview of the platform and its tools in one place to help users become productive quickly.
Pentaho Business Analytics Cookbook is the first book to go deep in Pentaho with a reasonable level of detail of all the pieces of the platform in one single book. By going through all of the book's recipes, you will gain the necessary knowledge to be productive in a very short period of time in order to start using this platform effectively. The book also covers topics such as Pentaho Metadata Editor and Pentaho Mobile, making this book the first comprehensive source of information on Pentaho.
Chapter 1, Getting Familiar with Pentaho User Console, introduces the reader to the new Pentaho User Console. Because of the new look and feel of the Pentaho User Console, this chapter is a good overview for novice users and also for navigated users who would like to quickly familiarize with the new user interface.
Chapter 2, Configuring Your BA Server Instance, goes into the details of the new Administration perspective, the place where administrative tasks should be carried out.
Chapter 3, Defining BA Server Data Sources, explains the new way to define data sources in Pentaho BA 5. We will go deep in the definition all of the major data source types by giving a complete and detailed description.
Chapter 4, Defining Business Models with the Pentaho Metadata Editor, describes the advantages of implementing a metadata domain model and explains, at a good level of detail, how to define a Pentaho metadata domain model from the ground up as well as shows how to deploy it.
Chapter 5, Creating Reports Using Pentaho Interactive Reporting, shows how to use a metadata domain model easily and how we can define a tabular report using the Pentaho User Console.
Chapter 6, Creating Analysis Reports, starts by giving a brief recap about what a Mondrian schema is and how to define it using Pentaho Schema Workbench. Then, it goes through the details of defining an analysis report by using Pentaho Analyzer and Saiku.
Chapter 7, Creating Reports Using Pentaho Report Designer, shows how to use the powerful Pentaho Report Designer to create wonderful reports easily and without difficulty.
Chapter 8, Creating Dashboards, goes through the design of interactive dashboards by using Pentaho Dashboard Designer and CDE.
Chapter 9, Scheduling Content, takes us through the details of the new scheduler interface and shows how to easily schedule our recurring jobs.
Chapter 10, Working with Pentaho Mobile BI, is the first instance where we have an overview of the Pentaho Mobile application, showing how our content can be easily accessed from a mobile device.
Chapter 11, Customizing Pentaho BA to Meet Your Business Needs, gives a brief introduction about how to customize the Pentaho User Console by defining new themes and presents some interesting plugins taken from Pentaho Marketplace that can help us in our everyday tasks.
Pentaho BA Server comes in two different versions, Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. The vast majority of the samples provided with the book can run on Pentaho BA Server Community Edition. Chapters 5, Creating Reports Using Pentaho Interactive Reporting; Chapter 6, Creating Analysis Reports (with the exception of the last recipe); Chapter 8, Creating Dashboards (with the exception of the last two recipes); and Chapter 10, Working with Pentaho Mobile BI, mandatorily require Pentaho Enterprise Edition to run the samples provided in the book.
The remaining software needed to run the samples are provided for free and are specified as follows:
Pentaho Metadata Editor: This is downloadable from http://community.pentaho.com/
Pentaho Schema Workbench: This is downloadable from http://community.pentaho.com/
Pentaho Report Designer: This is downloadable from http://community.pentaho.com/
MySQL Rel. 5.x: This is downloadable from http://dev.mysql.com
As soon as MySQL is installed and fully ready, it is time to create the database and the sample user and to restore the dump provided to run the samples. To do this, perform the following steps:
Go to the
<chapters_samples>/dbdirectory and unzip thefoodmart_mondrian.zipfileOpen a command-line window and go to the
<chapters_samples>/dbdirectory where we previously unpacked thedbarchiveConnect to MySQL by using the command-line MySQL client by typing the following command:
mysql –uroot –p<root_password>As soon as you are connected to the command-line client, type the following commands:
mysql>create database foodmart_mondrian default character set utf8; mysql>grant all on foodmart_mondrian.* to 'cookbook_usr'@'localhost' identified by 'password'; mysql>grant all on foodmart_mondrian.* to 'cookbook_usr'@'%' identified by 'password'; mysql>flush privileges; mysql>exit;
As soon as the MySQL command-line client closes, restore the dump by typing the following command:
mysqldump –uroot –p<root_password> foodmart_mondrian < ./foodmart_mondrian.sql
This book is the first comprehensive, single source of information about all the main Pentaho platform's components and gives you the opportunity to gain knowledge about the various aspects of the platform that contribute in building a complete BI solution. All the chapters give a clear understanding about each topic involved in implementing a BI solution so that by going through all of them, we are able to learn how to implement a complete BI solution from the beginning.
The book is an invaluable source of information for novice users who are coming to Pentaho for the first time and want to be productive as easily and as quickly as possible, and it is also a good source of information for advanced users who want to become productive with the new version as easily as possible.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input are shown as follows: "In the <baserver_home>/pentaho-solution/system/common-ui/resources/themes/cookbook directory, look for the globalCookbook.css file."
A block of code is set as follows:
<crystal> <file>mantleCrystal.css</file> </crystal>
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<crystal>
<file>mantleCrystal.css</file>
</crystal> Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
mysql>create database foodmart_mondrian default character set utf8;
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select the target folder by clicking on it, and then from the Folder Actions menu, select Upload."
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