The Kettle project has officially been acquired by Orlando, Florida-based Pentaho Corp to bolster its data integration capabilities in the areas of extract, transform and load (ETL) and enterprise information integration (EII).
Kettle utilizes a modern metadata-driven data integration architecture that comes with graphical tools for designing transformations. The project also provides a rich library of transformations and can be scaled upwards using caching, clustering and SQL optimization techniques.
Matt Casters, founder and primary sponsor of the Kettle project has also joined the Pentaho team as a data integration architect.
Pentaho said it chose its data integration technology very carefully. Currently there are several open source ETL projects underway including KTEL (Kinetic Networks), Enhydra Octopus, CloverETL, and the BEE project. These Java-based tools are designed to be embedded in custom data warehousing projects. While most are immature, their functionality & scalability are starting to ramp-up.
We reviewed many alternatives for open source data integration, and Kettle clearly had the best architecture, richest functionality, and most mature user interface, said James Dixon, Pentaho’s chief technology officer.
Started in 2002 by seasoned BI executives from Hyperion Solutions Corp, Cognos Inc and SAS Institute Inc, Pentaho has now assembled a broad yet cohesive set of interoperable Java-based OLAP, reporting, data mining, data integration and workflow software components that can be deployed individually or rapidly configured into a comprehensive BI system.
The first general release of the platform was delivered in December last year.
In many ways the company is aiming to deliver a LAMP-like stack for BI. LAMP is is an integrated framework of open source Linux, Apache Web server, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/ Python software components tested to work together.
Earlier this year Pentaho added the JFreeReport project (a Java report engine and library) to its BI suite and more recently announced support for JBoss Inc’s J2EE-based Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS).
Other projects that come under Pentaho’s stewardship include Mondrian OLAP, JPivot, Firebird RDBMS, Shark, Weka Data Mining, and Eclipse BIRT. ETL had been the only obvious missing component up to now.
