Hands on: MySQL Samples For Pentaho 1

I got a quite a few encouraging comments in response to my previous blog entry, Some thoughts on Pentaho and MySQL. Now let's see if I can turn all this talk about Pentaho and MySQL into something we can touch and look at.

I want to make a start in creating a bundle of MySQL centric Pentaho samples. The idea is to end up with at least one simple educational sample to for each of the main flavours of functionality offered by pentaho.

Pentaho

As far as Pentaho is concerned: I'm taking the preconfigured demo environment as a basis for a couple of reasons:

• Right now I'm not really interested in getting lost in the intricacies of setting up a J2EE server. There's plenty of time for that later on


• As an extension to my first point, the samples will be easier to deploy for other people as well


• The samples can be included in a future Pentaho demo environment with minimal effort

(Later, if and when I have a decent set of samles I might get rough and set up a demo pentaho environment from scratch to see how it works out if I replace the hypersonic database with MySQL.)

MySQL

For MySQL, I will assume a 5.0 generally available release. I will probably build most of the samples around the Sakila sample database. I hope it will be included in the MySQL release, and even if that's not the case, it is sufficiently easy to set it up.

It will also be quite interesting to build some things around some of the MySQL server level entities. The SHOW commands, several of the server variables and of course the mysql database are really always there, even in earlier MySQL versions. I envision that it should not be too difficult to build a few pentaho solutions that could actually be useful for real world database administration. Just a thought.

Functionalities

I want to have samples to cover at least the following areas of the BI space:

• Reporting


• ETL

Those are no-brainers actually. I think I really should also do

• Analytics


• Graphing

It starts to get really interesting if I could be able to use the more sophisticated Pentaho features:

• Datamining


• Business Rules


• Dashboards / KPI visualization


• Bursting


• Workflow

Taking the first step...

Ok, let's not hesistate and make a start right away:

Installing the Pentaho BI Platform

1. Use a web browser to navigate to the Pentaho download area


2. Pick up some of the pentaho documentation while you're in the download area. I recommend you download the Pentaho Quick Start and the Creating Pentaho Solutions pdf documents. Besides, this will give you something to read while the BI Platform is busy downloading.


3. Download the Pentaho BI Platform (pre-configured installation or PCI)


4. Install the BI Platform. The Quick start guide contains just enough details, but I'm not afraid to spoil the surprise: Windows and Mac users only need to unzip the distribution. Linux users need to install a rpm.


5. Installation results in a pentaho-demo directory. This is the serverroot, and it is commonly referred to as the PCI root or PCI install directory or something similar. To start the server, windows users run start-pentaho.bat; *nix users run start-pentaho.sh.


6. Open an internet browser, and navigate to: http://localhost:8080/. This may take a little while - the server needs to warm up.

You should see a web page that looks something like this:





On the right side, you see a few links to access a few administrative tasks. The folders on the left side contain the samples, and we'll be adding a new folder there to hold our MySQL samples.

Before we go there, we should first try a few of the packaged samples to verify that the server is functioning correctly. It is important to realize that some of the samples need some configuration before they'll work. However, we'll avoid that for now - There's penty of time to set that. Again, the Quick start guide gives you all the info you need in just 15 pages, but let's highlight a couple of things that work right out of the box and that are visually appealing:

1. Getting Started::Hello World


2. Reporting. Just give a few of there reports a sping


3. Chart Examples. Shows some of the included charting capabilities


4. Analysis / OLAP Examples. Demonstrates slice and dice


5. Dashboards

When you're done with pentaho, locate the stop-pentaho script in the PCI installation directory. Execute the script to stop de server.

Next time

Next time, I'll discuss some configuration tasks. I'll also discuss installing the sakila sample database. Stay tuned!