Pentaho B.I. Suite?

emjayess's picture

Has anyone here implemented or worked with the Pentaho open source B.I. Suite? I'm curious about what potential avenues and possibilities exist in bringing Drupal & Pentaho together for reporting & B.I.

Thoughts? Discussion? Experiences?

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No Love for Pentaho BI Suite?

emjayess's picture
emjayess - Tue, 2008-08-19 20:19

Nobody eh? I thought this might be a pairing that at least a few folks might get excited about...

--
Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter


I have used Pentaho and Drupal-yes-interesting possibilities.

acgarcia21's picture
acgarcia21 - Sat, 2008-08-23 12:38

Good morning Matt,

I've been playing with Pentaho for a few years and Drupal for about a year and a half.

I wrote some of my thoughts on this in my this blog entry
http://cognitivemetaphors.com/drupalpentahoblog

Afterwards, I googled Drupal Pentaho to see if anyone else had similar thoughts. Your article was first on the list.

I know a while back, Pentaho's own website was built on Mambo. That's actually how I started looking at content management systems. I was a business intelligence professional (Pentaho is open source business intelligence software) but really got interested in CMS. I went from Mambo to Joomla and then finally settled on Drupal where I am happily staying.

I've done side projects for both Drupal and Pentaho but nothing yet where I bring the two together. I'd love to find a web host that would support Pentaho. Then, I could really build a nice looking demo to illustrate the combination. I'm on bluehost.com now but I don't believe they support Java. I'd really rather not worry about the details of setting up my own server, putting it on the web, and installing all the necessary items PHP/Apache/JBoss/Java and keeping up with issues like configuration. Also don't want to spend too much on monthly $ for an expensive host. Right now, it's just a hobby.

In real life, I'm forced to use things like Sharepoint / SQL Server Reporting and ETL. Don't understand why companies spend money on these bloated tools when something like Drupal and Pentaho could do the same thing for so much less.

Regards,
Anthony Garcia
www.cognitivemetaphors.com


Convene & Collaborate?

emjayess's picture
emjayess - Wed, 2008-09-03 20:22

Hi Anthony,

I saw your comment & your blog post last week and am just now getting back around to this (hectic right now ;). Your observations echo my sentiments exactly! I'd very much like to advance this idea... what do you think about collaborating on some prototypes / proof-of-concepts to aid in bringing this blend of a solution to market... and potentially even collaborating on full-fledged projects?

I've got some ideas Re: hosting that I'd like to discuss with you, and even a potential project in the wings with a colleague I've been visiting with offline. Leave a comment and/or contact me directly.

--
Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter


In a previous life, I was a lead...

acgarcia21's picture
acgarcia21 - Thu, 2008-09-04 03:44

for a small analytics team that supported a large E-Commerce platform. We wrote sales, returns, inventory, marketing, visitor reports for the analysts of web stores we supported.

Currently, I am working on a Drupal/Ubercart project. I can definitely see how Pentaho could provide the complementary reporting to provide a dashboard for a Drupal e-commerce site.

I'm sure there are a number of scenarios such as this that would be viable offerings and worthwhile to collaborate on.

Anthony Garcia
www.cognitivemetaphors.com


Ubercart

emjayess's picture
emjayess - Wed, 2008-09-10 19:39

I've got Ubercart work to do in my immediate future, too... is yours a D5 or D6 project? Mine's D6, so I've held off for the summer while the D6 version has been under heavy development! Gonna be testing it very soon tho.

--
Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter


no experience yet, but very interested

kvantomme's picture
kvantomme - Thu, 2008-09-04 08:18

This sounds like a pretty exciting project, I am talking with a couple of students that would like to do a "Drupal thesis", I will discuss this option with them.

I read about an integration of Pentaho and Alfresco (integration is easier for them though since both are Java), anybody tried out the combination before? What kind of functionality do they offer?

Do you have any practical ideas on how the integration could work for Drupal?

I guess the biggest value lies in dashboard creation from the information you get out of your Drupal database, is there any other extra functionality you would get from the pair-up?

A quick check of the current charts/graph contributions brought me the following projects:
http://drupal.org/project/charts
http://drupal.org/project/swfcharts
http://drupal.org/project/fusioncharts
http://drupal.org/project/graphstat

Is there any way that we could integrate with these projects?

Drupalcon Szeged was a blast! Check out the video's on http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions


Summer of Code?

emjayess's picture
emjayess - Thu, 2008-09-04 15:31

I've read about Alfresco in high regard (and in good company!), but have never used it. Do you have a link to the Alfresco+Pentaho project?

I think stating that Alfresco & Pentaho are easier to integrate because they are both Java-based is a dangerous assumption to make. Integration/interoperability doesn't become easier solely because two systems are using the same language. It's more the architecture that determines whether a system is 'mashable', or a monolith.

There are a lot of possibilities and potential directions/applications for this pairing; just some early ideas...

  • Reporting & Analysis on your drupal database
  • Integrate Reporting/Analytics/B.I. from other sources into your Drupal community
  • Use Drupal for business functions, like CRM, and spot trends, etc.

The flow of ideas for applications will be strong, I have no doubt. It would be great to get some students involved -- maybe you could even think about proposing a summer-of-code '09 project!

--
Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter


integration

kvantomme's picture
kvantomme - Thu, 2008-09-04 20:03

I was hinting at the server stack, if you already have your CRM in Java, adding Pentaho is not that big a step.

From my first look at Pentaho it seems like it shouldn't be a problem to pull data from Drupal databases, I guess the issues will lay in integrating the output right? In their documentation they state however that they try to accomodate mashups (that's also where I read about the Alfresco mashup). However I haven't tried anything of this, so anybody with real experience please prove me wrong/right.

The way I understand it at this point this will only get you integration of predefined data processes, that you need to build in the Pentaho interface.

Drupalcon Szeged was a blast! Check out the video's on http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions


Low hanging fruit for Pentaho / Drupal.

acgarcia21's picture
acgarcia21 - Sun, 2008-10-12 13:23

From my perspective, the most important place to start would be to bring in Pentaho reporting and dashboard content as a Drupal node. This right away gives you dashboards and graphical reporting. Pentaho has the option to render it's reports as PDF or HTML or XML.

If you add Organic Groups and Notifications to the mix, you get a powerful channeled business alerts system.

I could think of a number of community sites where this would be killer.

I'm still trying to close up some project work I'm doing but when I free up, I'd like to work on getting a working Drupal / Pentaho environment up. Once I have that, I can build out some examples and maybe ask the community for help on the first Pentaho report as a node step.

Anthony Garcia
www.cognitivemetaphors.com


Re: business alerts system

outinsun - Wed, 2008-12-03 23:50

"From my perspective, the most important place to start would be to bring in Pentaho reporting and dashboard content as a Drupal node. This right away gives you dashboards and graphical reporting. Pentaho has the option to render it's reports as PDF or HTML or XML.

If you add Organic Groups and Notifications to the mix, you get a powerful channeled business alerts system."

+1


bi in drupal with Ubercart

jwlehane's picture
jwlehane - Tue, 2009-06-16 21:58

guys,

this is an exciting thread for me. I was looking for jaspersoft and drupal integration ideas when I ended up here. I have heard of, but never played with pentaho. We have ubecart, OG and notifications, ehich is the exact setup you are discussing. I would love to learn more about your experiences with pentaho, and se if any progress has been made. We also have developer resources if we can prove value in the project.

any updates?

thanks


I can help

razilon - Mon, 2008-10-27 16:32

My employer has asked me to look into this sort of Drupal + Pentaho cross. Unfortunately I have no prior experience with Pentaho, so I have a bit of a learning curve to overcome. I'd be interested in helping out with this/doing some of the grunt work if more experienced Pentaho users can help point me in the right direction.


Any progress on this? I am

jacoblane - Sat, 2009-07-04 14:38

Any progress on this? I am very new to Pentaho but am interested in helping.


We are interested in venturing out into the BI Space.

netclickonline's picture
netclickonline - Tue, 2009-07-14 00:39

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sorry but this is not allowed here

kvantomme's picture
kvantomme - Tue, 2009-07-14 07:31

This is a message without any Drupal value as such this is not the place for it. If your company is doing Drupal BI work, the way to talk about that here is by providing use cases or feature descriptions, along the lines of: we built this BI site using Drupal and that's how we did it.

An add for your company will get removed.