Phillip

BI is something I know absolutely nothing about, even tough the concept is very simple. With BI we extract data from different source (Excel spreadsheets, SQL databases, text files, ...), then we transform it so that it the output is easy to read and as a last step we load this data in report (or something similar). The goal of this ETL process is to gather all the business information and present it in such way that the people who read this can make decision based on this information.
Easy concept, isn't it ?

To form this ETL steps we use Pentaho, an open source BI framework written in Java. As you might have seen in the screenshots in the previous post, it's a graphical programming language. The only thing I have to do is placing and configuring blocks in the right order. Only a little bit of SQL or Javascript code is required.
This sounds easy, but the blocks can only do very simplistic operations thus you need quite some blocks to do basic operation.
You can compare it with electronics where you have to build logic with only NAND gates...

-- To be continued --