Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Reviews

Data transformation within Pentaho is a nice feature that they have and that I value.

Integration between databases and data import for a BI solution.

I would like to see more improvements with AS400 DB2. I journalled the tables/instance and the data migration is too slow if I compare it with other databases.

There were no issues with the deployment.

Until now, the stability of Pentaho is great. I've already tested various scenarios and I didn't feel a loss of performance.

There have been no issues so far in scaling the product.

I used self-learning to implement it and found that the tool is very easy to understand. For some things, I looked at YouTube videos for conceptual ideas during the planning phase.

I did it myself.

It allows for rapid prototyping of a wide array of ETL workloads.

Support for common Hadoop utilities can be expanded, such as bulk load with composite row keys for HBase, and include drivers for Impala out-of-the-box. A richer interface to Hive could also be beneficial as we currently have to go through a raw connection and execute SQL scripts, for which some syntax is not respected.

As of version 6, there are also some new issues introduced that pose a bit of an annoyance:

1) On kettle's ramp up - log4j errors

2) IBM Websphere MQ Producer - variable substitution for the URL does not work - you have to hardcode.

3) shared.xml for DB connections - variable substitution for connection properties does not work - have to hardcode things like Kerberos principal for a Hive/Impala connection.

We had no issues deploying it.

The robustness of this solution in a production cluster (>30 nodes) remains to be seen.

It is extremely flexible, it allows you to use variables/parameters for just about everything. 

It enables us to automate our reporting and ETL to a very high extent.

The product itself is great, the biggest downside in my opinion is that it is hard to find (hire) people with expertise. Our experience with Pentaho software is that few people have the required expertise. Hiring additional resources for projects can be tough.

Our solution is that we tend to train our own people, it’s definitely not hard to learn, basically anyone with SQL knowledge and experience in another tool can learn using Pentaho Data Integration very easily, but you might end up training them yourselves.

We had no issues with the deployment.

There was no issues with the stability.

We had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Train your own people!

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.

The best benefit of the product is that it is easy to use and to understand.

We have a huge amount of data that needs to be cleaned and made more valuable for our organization. This Data Integration helps us to achieve that goal.

I have used multiple versions of this product. The initial version we were on was v3.2 and we were had multiple issues, but currently don't find any issues as a blocker. In general, it would be good if we could get better performance from this product.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We haven't had any issues with stability except for those described in the Areas for Improvement.

We haven't had any issues with scalability.

There are other products out there, but I feel that this is the best one.

The most valuable thing for me is that it enables a technical product manager to be able to write ETL jobs themselves, which saves developers time so that they can do more important things.

Now developers focus on improving it as a tool (since it's open source) and teach Project Managers about it. The Project Managers are the ones responsible for their own ETL jobs as they know what they want, so hence it's best for them to manage their own jobs.

Its performance can be improved so it will work better with Big Data. Also, sometimes it can be very buggy which keeps away some potential users.

I've used it for two years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

The performance for Big Data needs to be improved.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

There is a community that can support limited technical help. I'll give a 6 to the community since it's not very active.

It was already in place when I joined the company.

It's very easy to install.

We did it in-hous. It's worth it to have someone in your company who knows Pentaho really well.

ROI is pretty good since it is kind of a major thing in our company.

The only cost is the time it takes for the developer to get to know it.

If your ETL jobs are small and straightforward, then this solution is definitely worth it.

It is a lightweight ETL tool that's easy to get started on. It connects seamlessly to most commonly used data sources.

The organization went with Pentaho ETL and Reporting solutions as cost effective products, as compared to competitors. The ETL part certainly met those objectives, along with serving the purpose.

Since there have already been newer versions, maybe some of these features are already fixed now. The most troublesome missing feature was the capability to produce crosstab reports with formatting capabilities in the BI Reporting product. The one annoyance that troubled us a lot was the fact that every step in a transformation that needed data, created its own data connection. With some data sources like Greenplum, this was a problem, because they have a limit on available number of connections.

I used it for three years, from 2012 to 2015, and only stopped as I left the organization.

One issue with encountered constantly with PDI deployments was that the environment parameters for jobs had to be updated manually through the designer module 'Spoon'. Although the product has a feature of keeping Environment Variables outside Spoon, that didn't work for us, as we had one Development server used for Dev, QA and UAT.

There were no issues with the stability.

We had no issues scaling it across the company as needed.

It's about average. Most of the help we got was through Google searches and Wiki pages. One time we had an issue with a feature - our version of PDI could not handle microseconds. The product owner came up with a solution, but instead of applying the patch, wanted to sell it to us for a fee.

I am only aware of the client side setup which was simple enough. It was pretty much a one step installation process.

It was done by an in-house team. A couple of issues we realized later were regarding memory configuration for the environment. This needs to be evaluated and fine tuned otherwise you can run into job failures with large amount of data. We ran into this issue with 'Commit' points and 'Sort' steps.

There was an evaluation performed, however I was not involved in it.

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.