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

Chapter 2. Prerequisites

The intention of this book is to let you, the reader, develop a Business Intelligence solution from start to finish (and even beyond because BI solutions need maintenance as well). In order to do this, you will need some additional tools that are not part of the Pentaho BI platform. These are primarily database-related tools used to design and create a database, validate the quality of the data in the source systems, and perform maintenance tasks such as making backups, creating users, and setting up data access restrictions. How to use the different tools is described in the respective chapters—for example, the subject of data profiling is covered in Chapter 8 and a hands-on tutorial of the tool we use for that task is included there as well. This chapter explains where to get the software and how it can be set up on a developer system.

Note

If you already have a running system with Java enabled and MySQL installed, you can probably skip most of this chapter. Its aim is to get the novice user up and running with the tools required to design, build, and manage databases in a Pentaho/MySQL installation.

Software release cycles, especially in the open source world, are relatively short. Since the time this book was finalized in July of 2009, new versions of the software we used may already have become available. In order to avoid possible confusion we list the version numbers of the software packages we used in the book:

• Ubuntu 9.04 (64 and 32 bit)

• Windows XP Pro ...