Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL at Dominant Systems Book Store

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.

Customer Reviews & Comments
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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