Both moves are part of an ongoing strategy by the Orlando, Florida-based start-up to present the market with a comprehensive and unified open source business intelligence platform.
Pentaho Data Integration 2.3, as it is now called, is based on open source software that Pentaho gained through its April acquisition of the Kettle project. It adds data-integration capabilities to an open source business intelligence (BI) suite that also includes OLAP, reporting, data mining, and workflow components.
The 2.3 release includes numerous enhancements around performance and data scalability to drive larger enterprise deployments and functional improvements around data mapping, user interface design, database integration, enterprise-scale deployment, and localization capabilities. It also deepens integration with databases, including new optimizations for faster interaction with larger MySQL data sets.
Another new addition in 2.3 is a table-mapping tool that links transformations to target database tables. The ETL tool’s user interface has been revamped to provide consistency across Microsoft, Linux, and Apple Mac developer interfaces.
There are new configuration options for flexible deployment in existing Pentaho installations. For example, users can now use the native Pentaho scheduler to manage and schedule ETL jobs for data warehouse updates and automated report refreshes once the job is complete. Pentaho said this level of integration would be much harder to achieve using a standalone reporting library.
Finally, the software introduces multi-lingual capabilities, delivering localized interfaces in Dutch, English, French, German, and simplified Chinese.
Meanwhile, Pentaho said it has done some more work to its Mondrian OLAP project, adding greater administration and end user features. The Mondrian project was originally set up in 2001, and last November Pentaho took over as chief steward and project owner, effectively ‘productizing’ the project as Analysis Services and making it a permanent fixture of its BI platform.
Pentaho, supported by a thriving open source development community, has driven additional enhancements to the Java-based software that provides classic data aggregation, calculation, and categorization functions found in commercial OLAP products.
Pentaho said it plans to roll out a new visual Schema Designer that helps administrators build multidimensional OLAP cubes. The design module is expected later this summer.
Another Mondrian component, Pentaho Spreadsheet Services, which is currently in beta and scheduled for release in July, will let business users access Pentaho Analysis cubes using Excel’s PivotTables.
The enhancements build on Pentaho’s earlier contributions to the Mondrian project that include tighter integration with dashboarding, scheduling, reporting, and workflow capabilities made available by the core Pentaho BI platform.
Started in 2002 by BI executives from Hyperion Solutions, Cognos, and SAS Institute, Pentaho is starting to assemble a broad set of interoperable Java-based BI components that can be deployed individually or configured into a comprehensive BI system. The first general release of the platform was delivered last December.
In many ways Pentaho is aspiring to develop a LAMP-like stack for BI. LAMP 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 announced support for JBoss’ J2EE-based Enterprise Middleware Suite. Other open source projects that also fall under Pentaho’s stewardship include JPivot, Firebird RDBMS, Shark, and Weka Data Mining.
The race is on among open source BI vendors to flesh out their BI suites as a way to offer less expensive alternatives to premium-priced commercially developed BI technologies from vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos. In June, JasperSoft Corp added an OLAP component to open source JasperReports product as part of its recently announced JasperIntelligence architecture. Like Pentaho’s BI platform, JasperIntelligence provides an architectural foundation for the integration of reporting, OLAP, and (soon to come) ETL components.
