Wednesday, July 8, 2009

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.

10 comments:

Dan said...

i've been using PDI as a data source for reporting for ages - it works perfectly fine in Pentaho platform 1.7.

I agree; It's an extremely strong feature.

ab said...

Thanks, thanks, and finally.. THANKS!
All of you at Pentaho are just awesome!!!
I really love what you do guys! I hope I'll be able to contribute to such a great platform some day..
Best regards, and keep on going!!

Unknown said...

A very good presentation. You explain the issue very well with clear English. Are you thinking about making a movie about new Report Designer 3.5? Sure it will be interesting.

Thanks from Barcelona.

Michael Tarallo said...

Yes. I am in the middle of doing those now. When ready I will post back here, they will be available on the Pentaho Pre-Sales Tools page found here:

http://www.pentaho.com/products/demos/presales_tools.php

Thanks for the great comments!

Ignacio said...

the video's link is broken. Can i see it?

Michael Tarallo said...

It works, just tested it, you need to use WebEx Network Recording player. It should auto download it.

Per Hoffmann Olsen said...

Thanks for you video,

one newbie question, can i feed these Movie Data row-by-row into another WebService, like a method called "updateCinemaMovies" which takes the row data as parameters?

Michael Tarallo said...

@Olsen - Yes you can. The output rows can then feed into an Input of another Web Service - similar to how I use the Generate rows step. You most likely wee need a job as well to coordinate the steps.

Unknown said...

Very good video tutorial, thank you!

Unfortunately, the last part does not work on my machine (using PDI 4.1.0 and Report Designer 3.7.0):

When I select the step "Report Output" and press "Preview", no data is fetched. The headline with the field names is there, but the rest of the table remains empty. The preview only works when I select the step "Web Services Lookup", but then - of course - I get the Movies field with all the XML tags in it.

Obviously, the Kettle transformation is not executed correctly in the Report Designer. The same transformation works perfectly fine in Spoon and Pan.

Any hints will be appreciated.

Best regards, Holger

Michael Tarallo said...

Make sure that Report Designer is not in offline mode first. That bit me once. If that is not it, I would open a JIRA at jira.pentaho.com to report it. Another thing you can verify is ensure that the same jars for the web service C:\Program Files (x86)\pentaho\design-tools\pdi-ee\data-integration\libext\webservices are in the report designer lib folders.
C:\Program Files (x86)\pentaho\design-tools\report-designer\lib

let me know

also check out http://sandbox.pentaho.com/