Before introducing PDI, let's talk about Pentaho BI Suite. The Pentaho Business Intelligence Suite is a collection of software applications intended to create and deliver solutions for decision making. The main functional areas covered by the suite are:
- Analysis: The analysis engine serves multidimensional analysis. It's provided by the Mondrian OLAP server.
- Reporting: The reporting engine allows designing, creating, and distributing reports in various known formats (HTML, PDF, and so on), from different kinds of sources. In the Enterprise Edition of Pentaho, you can also generate interactive reports.
- Data mining: Data mining is used for running data through algorithms in order to understand the business and do predictive analysis. Data mining is possible thanks to Weka project.
- Dashboards: Dashboards are used to monitor and analyze Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). CTools is a set of tools and components created to help the user to build custom dashboards on top of Pentaho. There are specific CTools for different purposes, including a Community Dashboard Editor (CDE), a very powerful charting library (CCC), and a plugin for accessing data with great flexibility (CDA), among others. While the Ctools allow to develop advanced and custom dashboards, there is a Dashboard Designer, available only in Pentaho Enterprise Edition, that allows to build dashboards in an easy way.
- Data integration: Data integration is used to integrate scattered information from different sources (for example, applications, databases, and files) and make the integrated information available to the final user. PDI—the tool that we will learn to use throughout the book—is the engine that provides this functionality. PDI also interacts with the rest of the tools, as, for example, reading OLAP cubes, generating Pentaho Reports, and doing data mining with R Executor Script and the CPython Script Executor.
All of these tools can be used standalone but also integrated. Pentaho tightly couples data integration with analytics in a modern platform: the PDI and Business Analytics Platform. This solution offers critical services, for example:
- Authentication and authorization
- Scheduling
- Security
- Web services
- Scalability and failover
This set of software and services forms a complete BI Suite, which makes Pentaho the world's leading open source BI option on the market.