Pentaho is a powerful Business Intelligence Suite offering many features: reporting, OLAP pivot tables, dashboarding and more.
Report Designer: An advanced report creation tool. If you want to build a complex data-driven
report, this is the right tool to use. Report Designer offers far more flexibility and functionality
than the ad hoc reporting capabilities of the Pentaho User Console.
• Design Studio: An Eclipse-based tool that enables you to hand-edit a report or analysis view
xaction file. Generally, people use Design Studio to add modifications to an existing report that
cannot be added with Report Designer.
• Aggregation Designer: A graphical tool that helps improve Mondrian cube efficiency.
• Metadata Editor: Enables you to add a custom metadata layer to an existing data source.
Usually you would do this for a data source that you intend to use for reporting; it's not
required, but it makes it easier for business users to parse the database when building a
query.
• Pentaho Data Integration: The Kettle extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, which enables
you to access and prepare data sources for analysis, data mining, or reporting. This is
generally where you will start if you want to prepare data for analysis.
• Schema Workbench: A graphical tool that helps you create ROLAP schemas for analysis.
This is a required step in preparing data for analysis.
