Pentaho for Big Data Analytics book review

When I first heard about this book, I got quite excited. I looked up the info on the Packt website and when I saw the page count, 118 pages, a bit question mark came up. Then I had a look at the table of contents, and suddenly, all my excitement was gone.

The book feels and reads like a marketing booklet that Pentaho themselves could have published with a title like 'Getting started with Pentaho Big Data within 6 hours'. Certainly, for somebody completely new to this topic, such a high level overview is a great introduction. But if you are already a bit familiar with Pentaho and know a little bit about Big Data, I can't quite see what you would win in ready this book. Don't get me wrong: The book is well written, easy to understand, but most of the chapters just scratch the surface, in the sense that they help you to get started, but then don't get into any further detail. The only chapter that probably provides a bit more detail is the one on CDE. The chapter on Pentaho Report Designer even only shows you have to open an existing report (from the biserver) and speaks you through the structure of a report.

One thing that I was really expecting to find in this book were some detailed examples about using Pentaho Kettle with Hadoop. The only thing covered is copying a file to HDFS, then to Hive and exporting a dataset from Hive, which is fairly easy to accomplish. At the very minimum, creating a simple map reduce job in Kettle (like the famous wordcount example) could have been covered. And even then, there could have been so much more written about this topic.

Also, another point is, who actually uses Hive as the data source of choice for powering a dashboard? If the data source has to be something related to Big Data, why not use Impala (or similar projects), where latency wouldn't be such an issue? Or follow to common approach and export the prepared data to a columnar DB like MonetDB etc.

So to sum it up: If you are new to Pentaho and new to Big Data, this book is well worth a read as a brief introduction. It will help you configure most Pentaho components correctly within a short amount of time and give you some ideas on what can be achieved. Take this as a starting point, more detailed questions will then have to be answered by other sources.

Talend Open Studio Cookbook (Book review)

I had some time in the holidays to read the recently published book "Talend Open Studio Cookbook" by Rick Barton. I have to admit, I was quite impressed by this book!

I can highly recommend it to everyone who is looking into getting started with Talend Data Integration but also to someone who has some experience with it, as there are quite a lot of useful tips and tricks mentioned as well.
The book takes a very practical approach, which ensures that you are up-to-speed in a very short amount of time. It covers all the essentials (from creating data integration jobs to finally scheduling them) plus covers some more advanced topics as well.

Overall the book is very well structured and brings across best practices in a very easy to understand manner. All the exercises focus on creating only the required functionality, so you start off with an already partially build data integration job and only fill in the required pieces, which makes it indeed a very good experience. The accompanying files all worked very well and I have to applaud the author for providing both the "partially build" job files as well as the completed ones.

In a nutshell: A highly recommended book - go out and get it!

Pentaho 5.0 Reporting by Example: Beginner’s Guide (Book review)

Ok, ok ... I said in the previous blog post that it was the last one for this year, but I certainly mustn't let the year end without mentioning the best book yet on Pentaho Report Designer: Pentaho 5.0 Reporting by Example: Beginner’s Guide!
It has taken quite a long time for somebody to publish a book on PRD for end users. Mariano García Mattío and Dario R. Bernabeu did an excellent job in explaining the broad functionality of PRD in an easy accessible manner. This is certainly a book that I will recommend to anyone starting out with PRD!
I was also asked to review the book (along with Dan) which was quite an interesting experience. So all in all a big thumbs up for this books ... go out an get it!

Book Review: Instant Pentaho Data Integration Kitchen

There are more and more books being published on Pentaho these days. This time, a little book called Instant Pentaho Data Integration Kitchen (ca. 76 pages) by Sergio Ramazzina is making its way into the hands of many eager Pentaho fans. This books provides a detailed overview of using the kitchen and pan utilities. It is a short practical book (everything is explained based on examples) that covers all the essential and some advanced topics (quite frankly, probably everything there is to say about these utilities) and I definitely give it big thumbs up! It makes a really nice introduction for somebody who is new to these utilities and even covers some advanced topics (like execution of archived jobs and transformations) for the seasoned user. All this is beefed up with some nifty tips and tricks!