Pentaho® Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL®

Chapter 4. The Pentaho BI Stack

Pentaho is a business intelligence suite rather than a single product: it is made up of a collection of computer programs that work together to create and deliver business intelligence solutions. Some of these components provide functionalities that are very basic, such as user authentication or database connection management. Other components deliver functionality that operates at a higher level, such as visualizing data using charts and graphs.

Often, but not always, the components that offer high-level functionality rely on other components offering low-level functionality. As such, the collection of programs that forms the entire suite can quite literally be viewed as a stack of components, each level bringing functionality closer to the end user. The Pentaho BI stack is shown in Figure 4-1, where all the components that make up the complete solution are shown.

In this chapter, we describe the different components, their functions, and, where applicable, the relationships that exist between them. In Figure 4-1, the main layers of the stack are clearly identified, with the presentation layer at the top and the data and application integration layer at the bottom. Most end users will interact with the presentation layer, which can take many forms. Pentaho can be accessed by a simple web browser, but the components can also be embedded in an existing portal such as LifeRay or a content management system such as Alfresco. Perhaps the most common form ...