Pentaho goes to the Movies - Data Integration and Citrus Report Designer

Yep, once again I roped you in with one of my wacky blog titles. Seriously though, the point of this blog entry is to share some powerful capabilities in the Pentaho BI Suite as well as to preview a feature in the up and coming release of the new Pentaho Report Designer, version 3.5

I have always stated that a powerful technology differentiator within the Pentaho BI Suite, when compared to traditional proprietary BI software or even other commercial open source reporting, is that the Pentaho architecture brilliantly brings together data integration and content delivery under one common BI platform from one vendor. A good example of this is seen below in this brief 15 minute video. It will demonstrate using Pentaho Data Integration 3.2 to create a transformation which accesses a public movie listing web service (WSDL)...then transform the response from the web service to make the columns and data available to a Pentaho Report created with the new Pentaho Report Designer.

Now..., this was always possible with the current release of Pentaho but only during run time of the report. (there is a document in the KB that explains this process) However, with the new Pentaho (Citrus) Report Designer 3.5 we have added many more data access components, one of them being Pentaho Data Integration. This means you are now able to access the Pentaho Data Integration transformation (.ktr) as a data source during design time to create your BI content. Your report or BI content now has a real-time or near real-time data access method.

So whether it is input from a web service, salesforce.com CRM, or even our new Google Analytics step, you have increased the possibilities of creating more robust and real-time or near real-time types of applications.

Imagine the possibilities and take a look at the video below, please provide your comments if you wish.

You can view the Pentaho TechCast here.