Pentaho Offers MongoDB BI Integration

Pentaho and MongoDB have announced advanced MongoDB integration with the Pentaho Business Analytics 5.0 platform, which launched Sept. 12.

Together, these technologies provide an interactive analytical solution that meets the increasing requirements for big data in businesses today, Jake Cornelius, senior vice president of products at Pentaho, told eWEEK.

The expanded level of native integration between Pentaho Business Analytics 5.0 and MongoDB provides an analytics capability with full support for MongoDB Replica Sets, Tag Sets and Read and Write Preferences for this popular NoSQL data store. The combination of Pentaho Business Analytics and MongoDB helps business users and developers increase data value, reduce complexity, and accelerate data access and querying.

With Pentaho, MongoDB data can be accessed, blended, visualized and reported in combination with any other data source for increased insight and operational analytics. Also, reporting on data stored in MongoDB is simplified, increasing developer productivity with Pentaho's automatic document sampling, drag-and-drop interface and schema generation.

Additionally, with no impact on throughput, this integration builds on the features and capabilities in MongoDB, such as the Aggregation Framework, Replication and Tag Sets.

"As the MongoDB ecosystem continues to grow, tools like Pentaho Business Analytics 5.0 provide critical capabilities for the enterprise," Matt Asay, vice president of business development and corporate strategy at MongoDB, said in a statement. "We are pleased to partner with a leading business analytics company to help make it easier to both orchestrate data movement between other systems and MongoDB, using drag-and-drop tools, and provide business reporting."

Pentaho's MongoDB integration helps businesses "take advantage of the performance and capabilities of MongoDB, with easy access to data for analytics and reporting, and to then blend MongoDB with all the data in the organization to create complete business insights," Eddie White, executive vice president, business development at Pentaho, said in a statement. "Pentaho and MongoDB engineers worked collaboratively for over a year to tightly integrate and exploit the latest features and capabilities in MongoDB, delivering a much easier and more powerful option for MongoDB developers."

Asay told eWEEK the MongoDB/Pentaho integration involved significant effort and deep architectural work. "We spent a year-plus to get to this point," he said. "What we are doing with Pentaho is what we hope and expect other ISVs will do with MongoDB.

In a blog post about the integration, Asay noted that open source is now the hotbed for innovation. "Open source has moved from imitator to innovator, and modern business intelligence (BI) tools like Pentaho reflect this," he said. "Today, most BI tools are still tightly integrated with relational databases (RDBMS). But as Pentaho showed in its most recent Pentaho Business Analytics 5.0, this is set to change. BI tool vendors who persist in offering second-hand integration to first-class data sources like NoSQL databases are going to fall behind."

Meanwhile, Pentaho 5.0 provides a full spectrum of analytics for big data-driven businesses, regardless of data type and volume, IT architecture or analysis required. The new interface simplifies the user experience. Pentaho 5.0 includes more than 250 new features and improvements.

Pentaho 5.0 enables analysts to blend all data types and report, visualize and explore for greater insights. Blending big data "at the source" maintains the appropriate level of data governance and security necessary for accurate and reliable analysis. Analysts working in distributed, virtualized data environments need accurate, near-real-time big data blends for timely and accurate analysis. Typical end-user blending requires the staging of data, resulting in data sets that are often out of date. With the big data integration capabilities in Pentaho 5.0, analysts can confidently blend all data in near real-time and immediately analyze the results.

Pentaho officials said up-to-date integrations and certifications for popular big data stores ensure businesses keep pace with ongoing changes in the big data ecosystem and are prepared for the future. New integrations include Splunk, Amazon Redshift, Cloudera Impala; certifications include MongoDB, Cassandra, DataStax, Cloudera, Intel, Hortonworks and MapR.

New capabilities like job re-start, roll-back and load balancing are all included in Pentaho 5.0. Pentaho 5.0 includes new REST services for simplified embedding of analytics and reporting into Web-deployed applications delivered "as a service."

"With Pentaho 5.0, businesses striving to increase their competitive advantage with big data analytics can achieve greater accuracy with much simpler, faster processes at every critical stage," Pentaho's CEO Quentin Gallivan said in a statement.

Tony Cosentino, vice president and research director at Ventana Research, said: "We have identified five key analytic personas in the enterprise. Pentaho 5.0 offers benefits to all these roles and has developed functionality to help eliminate many of the common pain points that are holding back big data initiatives in companies of all sizes."