Introduction
The following instructions cover the basics of installing and configuring the Pentaho Community Edition Business Analytics tools on a Windows 7, Windows 10 or Windows Server operating system. (Click here for MacOSX instructions).
Pentaho is a market-leading vendor of business analytics tools which include:
- BA Server and User Console used to create analytics content such as dashboards and reports. These tools are categorized into two main areas:
- Web-Based Design Tools and Plugins: Report Designer, Analyzer, Interactive Reporting, Dashboard Designer and Mobile designer.
- Client-Based Design Tools: Aggregation Designer, Metadata Editor and Schema Workbench
- Data Integration Server used to create, schedule and execute Extract, Translation and Loading (ETL) jobs. These components include:
- Spoon: User interface to create, schedule and execute ETL jobs
- Kitchen, Pan and Carte: Scheduling and coordinating collections of ETL jobs.
- Plug-Ins including Instaview and AgileBI that allow the designer to interactively view and model source data and transformations.
Pre-requisites
To work with Pentaho BA Server you will require an Intel based PC running Windows, Linux or MacOSX that has at least 8GB of RAM and 4GB of free disk space. It may run on as little as 4GB of RAM but some editing needs to be done to the startup scripts (described later). A 64-bit Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is required and instructions on installing an appropriate JRE are provided later in this tutorial.
Commercial (Enterprise Edition) vs. Community Edition
Pentaho offers both a commercial (Enterprise Edition) version (with a 30-day free trial option) and a Community Edition (CE) version. The commercial (EE) version includes an installer program that automates installing and configuring all of the tools including a Postgres database server to host the BA Repository. Check here for tips on installing the commercial version. The Community Edition is a bit more challenging to set up as some of the configuration steps need to be carried out by hand.
This installation guide covers installing and configuring the Community Edition version 5.4 (or 6.x or 7.x) on Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (64-bit). For instructions on installing Pentaho on Mac OS X, please visit this tutorial.
When working with the Pentaho tools and when searching for help, keep in mind that some of the documentation posted at the Pentaho site refers to the commercial version. For example, the commercial version installs and configures a number of Windows services such as the BA Analytics server and Postgres database server. The community edition requires you to run the BA Server instance when you want to use Pentaho (although you can create your own Windows service to do this if you like).
In order to get started working with Pentaho, you must install and configure a 64-bit Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK). These steps are described in the next section.