Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Reviews

The most valuable feature is that it can take inputs from all formats, e.g. CSV, text, Excel, JSON, Hadoop, etc. It has the potential to provide the output in the format we require, and we can also use many database connections. The transformations listed are also very useful and are very self-explanatory. 

Also, the data mining feature which comes with the Pentaho business analytics suite was very useful to our project, especially the Weka plugin. We could score the records in the data warehouse, which helped in predicting the values.

Lastly, the GUI is very easy to use, so we can perform transformations with data very quickly, and create reports indicating the KPI in the reporting tool. I think that a company wouldn't need to spend more money on getting an experienced person to use this tool. All you need is a balance of experienced users and new trainees to get going. You can also start using the business analytics tool once you have integrated data. Coaching and  applying this technology enterprise wide will enable your business to take data driven decisions.

It makes it possible for the seniors to train new employees and junior staff very quickly. All that is needed is strong knowledge of ETL and BI/Big Data concepts to use this software.

I would like to see the data visualization tool combined with BI so I can see how data is progressing through various stages. I do think that they are working on this already. I also found, in my case, that the statistical data input wasn't working (.sas7bdat input wasn't working).

There have been no issues with the deployment.

It could have been the case that I may not have been doing it the right way.

We have had no issues scaling it.

I would say it is one of the most affordable tools to use for business intelligence.

You should go for this tool to manage your data warehouse, but I would suggest that you look for other reporting tools, such as Tableau, which are more user friendly and provide great insights in the data.

The most common use for the solution is gathering data from our databases or files in order to gather them into a different database. Another common use is to compare data between different databases. Due to a lack of integrity, you can attach these to synchronization issues.

One important feature, in my opinion, is the Metadata Injection. It gives flexibility to the scripts due to the fact that the scripts don't depend on a fixed structure or a fixed data model. Instead, you can develop transformations that are not dependant on the fixed structure or data models. 

Let me give a pair of examples. Sometimes your tables change, adding fields or dropping some of them. When this happens if you have a transformation without using Metadata Injection your transformation fails or doesn't manage the whole info from the table. If you use Metadata Injection instead, the new fields are included and the dropped columns are excluded from the transformation. Other times you have a complex transformation to apply to a lot of different tables. Traditionally, without the Metadata Injection feature, you had to repeat the transformation for each table, adapting the transformation to the concrete structure of each table. Fortunately, with the Metadata Injection, the same transformation is valid for all the tables you want to treat. A little bit effort gives you a great benefit.

Furthermore, the solution has a free to use community version.

The solution is easy to set up, very intuitive, clear to understand and easy to maintain.

I'm currently looking at a new competitor that's got some interesting features that this solution doesn't have. I have found this competitor has a feature braking system that is not present in the Pentaho Data Integration approach. The way their system sets can somehow maintain a track for the last executions and store the state which gives you the potential to run from the point that it ended the last time. It's very interesting. It would be nice if Pentaho had this type of feature.

Often you are required to install plugins. If you need to have access to, in my case, Neo4j databases new folder databases, you do need a plugin to do it.

Between my current role and the role at my last company, I've been working with the solution for over five years.

It's not very stable, at least not in the case of the community edition. I'm working with the community edition right now and I think perhaps it is because of that it is not very stable, it causes the system to sometimes hang. I'm not sure if this is the case for pair tiers.

I am the only person using the solution currently. There are two other people that occasionally also assist in it. I'm helping them understand the tool and they are beginning to use it. In that sense, we're slowly scaling.

I don't know if the solution scales well on a large scale, however.

It scales very well, overall with the very useful feature to run n copies to Start attribute in every step, perhaps balancing with the side effect of consuming a lot of memory and CPU resources.

We haven't really contacted technical support in the past. We try to handle any issues ourselves in-house. I can't speak to the quality of the technical support, having never directly dealt with them.

We've never really used another solution like this in our organization. This is the first.

The solution is pretty simple to set up. It's not complex.

For our, deployment took about one month.

Maintenance is easy. The only maintenance tasks are to upgrade to the newer versions and backing up the repository frequently.

I handled the implementation on my own. I didn't need any help from a reseller or consultant.

We're using the community edition, which is free to use. I'm not sure how much their paid services cost. We haven't purchased any licensing.

We're just users of the solution. We don't have a professional relationship with the company.

The solution is great to use and easy to share with teams via the central repository. It's very functional overall. I'd recommend the solution to other companies.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

First of all, the ease of deployment. I’m pretty sure that almost anyone could do simple transformations without having any knowledge of  IT. Thanks to its graphical interface this tool is just drag and click. Another advantage, is that it fits everywhere. You can connect it to Big Data sources, relational databases, and all types of files. If the developer missed something, you can try finding it in the marketplace or quickly develop it yourself, because it is opensource. 

We use it almost everywhere, for creating data marts, data warehouses, and implementing BI reporting tools. We also build our Customer Centralized File and Data Quality Studio using it. What’s more, we use it for small solutions too, i.e. if we want to quickly export data from database to .xlsx. We also develop our own plugins for PDI and put them into the marketplace. 

A big advantage, but also a problem, is that it is open source. Almost anyone can develop their own Pentaho code and release it. Now, Pentaho is a little messy, and some parts of it are super new and some look like it were developed at the beging. I think that developers should stop inventing new parts of it, and it can take a while to clean the code and optimize the older parts of it. Some old plugins, after a long time, still doesn’t work properly enough.

I've been using it for four years, and when I started using it I was in college. I quickly found that PDI with my text search analytic plug-in is useful for preparing notes for classes. When I was bored I came up with a funny tool. It was collecting data from all my roommates about what they need from shop and it was sending notifications to peoples phones who were going to the shop.

We have never had any problems with deployment.

There are some with stability. As I said before there are some small bugs but it’s Pentaho you can always find workaround for it.

With the Pentaho Community version you just download it, unpack, and it should be running. If not you should also install Java. 

Customer service isn’t needed. Every problem solution is on the internet. If not,  you can post it to community forum and you will get an immediate answer, but I have never had to post a new topic.

Straightforward. You just need to unzip file and you can already run it. There is also some setup if you need. It’s very simple you just need to edit three files in notepad. 

I did this myself and we do it for other companies. All installations are easy, and you do not need to be an IT magician. 

There is a Community Edition which is free. There is also an Enterprise licence but the price varies depending on the server hardware configuration and the purpose of use (BigData, Hadoop, etc.).

I had the chance to test SAS Data Integration but I didn’t fall in love with it like I did with PDI. I think that PDI is easier to use and you can do much more with PDI than with SAS.

The tool is excellent, and almost everyone can use it. You just need to take it out of the box and run. There is no limit to the application – you can do everything with it. However, it still has a lot of faults. Not every component runs as you wish to. Always look for solutions on the Internet. There are many problems and build transformations/jobs that are already fixed. 

It's an ETL Platform including Big Data enablement. It's the most easy to use, extend and deploy. It helps to connect to various data sources including all available databases.  

We also use Pentaho Analyzer which is an ad-hoc analytics tool built on Mondrian OLAP server that enables the end user to slice and dice the data in various patterns.

We Implement Pentaho for data warehouses and BI features for our various customers. No software can give as complete functionality for fulfilling end user requirements as Pentaho. As well as this, Pentaho offers a flexible platform which enables us to extend the tool to any of the end user's requirement. 

Another impressive feature is the Big Data implementation/integration is very quick and simple without the need to write any code. This enabled our clients to get maximum ROI with in a short period.

Pentaho Dashboard Designer - needs an improvement on the various features of the Dashboards, since there are CTools available and which help to fulfil the gaps, but it needs developers involvement. A full fledged Dashboard designer to perform all the functions of what we do in CDE/CDF would be a great improvement for Pentaho.

Build Process - an inbuilt build process would provide an advantage to migrate between DEV-QA-UAT-PROD, currently it is mostly performed manually.

Data Profiling - including data profiling as part of PDI would be a great improvement to the platform and helps customers to save a lot of effort/cost of data quality.

We are Pentaho Service Providers and have implemented more than 130 projects in Pentaho. We are not direct customers of Pentaho but we recommend Pentaho to our clients if it meets their requirements.

We had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no stability issues.

We have not had any issues scaling it for our customers.

It is quick and easy to implement.

Pentaho is available both in Community (Free) and Enterprise Edition (Subscription based) depending upon your budget.

One of the best feature to lookout in this platform is its flexibility in enhancing or adapting to your requirements. Implementation can be very quick, you can enable few dashboards and analytics to your organization in a week's time.

It allows for very quick development due to the intuitive interface. Compared to other ETL tools like Powercenter, SSIS and SAS DI Studio it excels in rapid development cycles.

It gave ‘out-of-the-box’ widgets for reading XML and JSON interfaces which would otherwise have to be build from scratch.

PDI excels at the development part. Administration and monitoring are pretty weak and basic. But, I must say I have been spoiled with the great capabilities that Powercenter offers ‘out-of-the-box’ The Pentaho development team seems to rely very heavily on Linux/Unix for the admin part. Debugging could be enhanced with better feed-back.

We used PDI 4.3 in a pilot against SSIS during 2013 for a couple of months. In 2014 I have the 4.4 version on a daily basis within a production environment for exactly one year. We also looked into the commercial front-end solution and found this to be too much of a collection of loosely connected applications

There have been no deployment issues.

Stability is a bit of an issue. The GUI quite often ‘freezes’ and the is no alternative to killing the session. Very frequent saving is in order

There have been no issues with scalability.

The community site is pretty brilliant. Every technical component is handled on its own Wiki page. You can even look into the scrum backlog of the dev. team. Absolutely amazing.

Heavy ETL solutions were simply too expensive and the SSIS alternative is simply too hidious to consider. It took at least three times as much time to develop the same ETL proces with SSIS as compared to Pentaho. (And having to deal with the abject Microsoft ‘debugging’.

Incredibily easy. Just unpack, make sure you got the right drivers installed, and beware of other Java applications running.

We simply did everything ourselves, with a little aid from the community.

Make sure Pentaho solutions are still available as they were prior to the commercial take-over. Administration is not the best developed component . The ETL is brilliant. Make sure that the admin part is covered.

It's very simple compared to other products out there.

We use Pentaho for data integration, but also PI to implement data mining. That has improved the intelligence behind the data. So, we are able to provide our customer with the ability to understand their data. Our customer produces terabytes of data, so arranging the data, cleaning the data, on data integration, aided our customer to understand the data to improve their business.

One thing that I don't like, just a little, is the backward compatibility. I used Pentaho from version 4, and version 6 does not work with the whole ETL design. So backward compatibility is a problem.

I have worked with this product for seven years.

It's a stable product. In fact, contains some mocks, where you can write your own Java software, and do an ETL, specific for your needs.

The support is very fast, but there are also a lot of forums to address problems, so you can find the solution to your issue easily. There is also the possibility to buy support, and when we bought support they resolved our problem in 24 hours.

It was very, very simple. I copied the integration folder, started the tool to design the ETL, and it worked. Time was required to design the ETL, just to understand how each block works. So, when you understand how each block works, you need spend no more time to use the product.

Before using Pentaho, I analyzed other products to understand what is the best ETL product. I tested Talend and Oracle Data Integrator. Oracle Data Integrator is a little bit more difficult to understand, how it works.

So, I preferred Pentaho Data Integration because you just have to drag and drop the block, draw a line to connect the block, write the query, and connect to the DB. There's nothing else you need to do. For Oracle Data Integrator, and also for Talend, you spend more time installing the product. By contrast, with Pentaho, you just have to copy the folder, launch the product, and then you just need the Java machine and it works.

When you start to use this product, if you have just a little experience and know about ETL, you will have to spend little time to learn the it. The product is very, very simple to understand. You can build functionality by yourself.

Anyone thinking about an ETL product, if they want high productivity on data cleaning and data movement, Pentaho Data Integration, in my opinion, is the best tool.

Developed ETL processes to load a data warehouse. Has improved our data integration capabilities.

• Easy to use
• Development of the product
• A lot of predefined steps
• Good open source option

There is not a data quality or MDM solution in the Pentaho DI suite.

No issues.

I could not connect to our Hadoop environment in an easy and flexible way, and it was important to scale our data warehouse.

I work with the Community Edition, therefore I do not have support. There was an issue that I could not resolve with community support.

I switched from our previous solution for cost reasons.

It was not complex.

There is a good open source option (Community Edition).

No.

There is a lack of support if you work with the Community Edition.