
Pentaho Tutorial – Best Resources To Learn in 1 Day | CHECK OUT
Last updated on 08th Jul 2020, Blog, Tutorials
- Pentaho is a Business Intelligence tool which provides a wide range of business intelligence solutions to the customers.
- It is capable of reporting, data analysis, data integration, data mining, etc.
- Pentaho also offers a comprehensive set of BI features which allows you to improve business performance and efficiency.
- Pentaho Reporting is a suite (collection of tools) for creating relational and analytical reports.
- It can be used to transform data into meaningful information. Pentaho allows generating reports in HTML, Excel, PDF, Text, CSV, and xml.
- This tutorial provides a basic understanding of how to generate professional reports using Pentaho Report Designer.
What Is Pentaho Reporting?
- Pentaho Reporting is a suite (collection of tools) for creating relational and analytical reporting.
- Using Pentaho, we can transform complex data into meaningful reports and draw information out of them.
- Pentaho supports creating reports in various formats such as HTML, Excel, PDF, Text, CSV, and xml.
- Pentaho can accept data from different data sources including SQL databases, OLAP data sources, and even the Pentaho Data Integration ETL tool.
Features Of Pentaho
Following, are important features of Pentaho:
- ETL capabilities for business intelligence needs
- Understanding Pentaho Report Designer
- Product Expertise
- Offers Side-by-side subreports
- Unlocking new capabilities
- Professional Support
- Query and Reporting
- Offers Enhanced Functionality
- Full runtime metadata support from data sources
Pentaho Reporting primarily includes a Reporting Engine, a Report Designer, a Business Intelligence (BI) Server. It comes loaded with the following features −
- Report Designer − Used for creating pixel perfect report.
- Metadata Editor − Allows to add user-friendly metadata domain to a data source.
- Report Designer and Design Studio − Used for fine-tuning of reports and ad-hoc reporting.
- Pentaho user console web interface − Used for easily managing reports and analyzing views.
- Ad-Hoc reporting interface − Offers a step-by-step wizard for designing simple reports. Output formats include PDF, RTF, HTML, and XLS.
- A complex scheduling sub-system − Allows users to execute reports at given intervals.
- Mailing − Users can email a published report to other users.
- Connectivity − Connectivity between the reporting tools and the BI server, which allows to publish the content directly to the BI server.
Pentaho BI Suite

Pentaho BI Suite includes the following components:
Reporting
Pentaho reporting depends on the JFreeReport project. It helps you to fulfill your business reporting needs. This component also offers both scheduled and on-demand report publishing in popular formats such as XLS, PDF, TXT, and HTML.
Analysis
It offers a wide range of analysis a wide range of features that includes a pivot table view. The tool provides enhanced GUI features (using Flash or SVG), integrated dashboard widgets, portal, and workflow integration.
Moreover, Pentaho Spreadsheet Services allows a user to browse, pivot, and use chart from within MS Excel.
Dashboards
The dashboard offers Reporting and Analysis, which contribute content to Pentaho Dashboards. The self-service dashboard designer includes extensive built-in dashboard templates and layout. It allows business users to build personalized dashboards with little training.
Data Mining
- Data mining tool discovers hidden patterns and indicators of future performance.
- It offers the most comprehensive set of machine learning algorithms from the Weka project, which includes clustering, decision trees, random forests, principal component analysis, neural networks.
- It allows you to view data graphically, interact with it programmatically, or use multiple data sources for reports, further analysis, and other processes.
Pentaho Data Integration
- This component is used to integrate data wherever it exists.
- Rich transformation library with over 150 out-of-the-box mapping objects.
- It supports a wide range of data source which includes more than 30 open source and proprietary database platforms, flat files. It also helps Big Data analytics with integration and management of Hadoop data.
Pentaho Servers And Stacks
There are different versions of Pentaho server, like open source, professional standard, professional premium and enterprise. There are three layers: the presentation layer, which has reporting, analysis, dashboards and process management. Then comes the Business Intelligence platform, which has security, administration, business logic and repository under it. Data and Application Integration has ETL, Metadata and EII under it. This can be built on a third party application like CRM, legacy data, OLAP, other applications and local data.
Pentaho has its presence in all three layers with the respective products- Data layer, server layer and client layer. A server layer has recently regained from BI (Business Intelligence) to BA (Business Analytics). It is now known as Pentaho Business Analytics. It can be extended by commercials as well as open source plug-ins; hence, the data can be published on the server. The user can also run any kind of reports on it. The dashboard can also be displayed and designed. The Pentaho Analyzer is for the Ad-hoc reporting. It runs by default on Apache Tomcat but can be embedded in any java-based application server. Pentaho analyzer is meant for reporting. Scheduling and monitoring is meant for the purpose of scheduling reports, monitoring them and sending them to business users. It comes in two flavours namely Community Edition(CE) and Enterprise Edition(EE).
Who Is Using Pentaho BI?
Pentaho BI is a widely used tool by may software professionals like:
- Open source software programs
- Business analyst and researcher
- College students
- Business intelligence councilor
Install Pentaho In AWS
Step 1) Go to the link and click Continue to Subscribe

Step 2) Accept the Terms

Step 3) Click Continue to Configuration

Step 4) Keep the settings default, and Click Continue to Configuration.

Step 5) Check the usage instructions and wait 5 minutes for instance to launch.

Step 6) Get Public IP of the instance.

Step 7) Use the public IP of the instance to access it.

Pentaho Administration Console
Report Designer:
It is an advanced report creation tool. This is an ideal tool for you if you want to build a complete data-drive report. This tool offers plenty of flexibility and functionality than the ad hoc reporting capabilities of the Pentaho User Console.
Design Studio:
It is an Eclipse-based tool. It allows you to hand-edit a report or analysis. It is widely used to add modifications to an existing report that cannot be added with Report Designer.
Aggregation Designer:
This graphical tool allows you to improve Mondrian cube efficiency.
Metadata Editor:
It is used to add custom metadata layer to any existing data source.
Pentaho Data Integration:
The Kettle extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, which enables
Advantages Of Using Pentaho
- Pentaho BI is a very intuitive tool. With some basic concepts, you can work with it.
- Simple and easy to use Business Intelligence tool
- Offers a wide range of BI capabilities which includes reporting, dashboard, interactive analysis, data integration, data mining, etc.
- Comes with a user-friendly interface and provides various tools to Retrieve data from multiple data sources
- Offers single package to work on Data
- Has a community edition with a lot of contributors along with Enterprise edition.
- The capability of running on the Hadoop cluster
- JavaScript code written in the step components can be reused in other components.
Disadvantages Of Using Pentaho
Here, are cons/drawbacks of using Pentaho BI tool:
- The design of the interface can be weak, and there is no unified interface for all components.
- Much slower tool evolution compared to other BI tools.
- Pentaho Business analytics offers a limited number of components.
- Poor community support. So, if you don’t get a working component, you need to wait till the next version is released.
Conclusion
- Pentaho is a Business Intelligence tool which provides a wide range of business intelligence solutions to the customers
- It offers ETL capabilities for business intelligence needs.
- Pentaho suites offer components like Report, Analysis, Dashboard, and Data Mining
- Pentaho is widely used by 1) Business analyst 2) Open source software programmers 3) Researcher and 4) College Students.
- The installation process of Pentaho includes: 1)Hardware requirements 2) Software requirements, 3) Downloading Bl suite, 4) Starting the Bl suite, and 5) Administration of the Bl suite
- Important components of Pentaho Administration console are 1) Report Designer, 2) Design Studio, 3) Aggregation Designer 4) Metadata Editor 5) Pentaho Data Integration
- Pentaho is a Data Integration (PDI) tool while BI stack is an ETL tool.
- The biggest advantage of Pentaho is that it is simple and easy to use Business Intelligence tool.
- The main drawback of Pentaho is that it is a much slower tool evolution compared to other BI tools