Hi, all.
I'm new to Pentaho suite, so I apologize in advance if this topic overlaps previous posts. I searched for every possible word combination I could think of, but couldn't find any answer to my issues.
I recently downloaded the Pentaho Data Integration and Business Analytics packages from Pentaho's web-site. Getting these things to run was a major pain in itself: I first downloaded the Linux 64-bit versions, but after three installation attempts, I gave up and moved to a Windows installation. On my Windows 7 machine, I experienced every type of bizarre problem when installing the packages in the Program Files directory, so I attempted an installation to the HD root (C:\Pentaho). This turned out to be the best working installation, and I call it "best working" because it's not yet fully functional, as the PDI Server does run (in none of the previous attempts I got to this point) but refuses my login attempts. It claims that the system is down for maintenance and that I should contact the administrator, while the Tomcat console reveals a number of frustrated attempts to locate a certain validation.properties file.
But beware that this is not the main motivation for this post. Regardless of the PDI server issues, I got the Kettle tool to work and managed to quickly build a UDJC transformation that fetches data from a set of files and outputs a sequence of records. The next step would be to use this transformation as a BA Data Source so that I could create nice Dashboards to display it, but I've spent the last couple of days trying to accomplish this simple step with no success.
When I login to the BA server, my intuition says that I should first create a new Data Source based on my Kettle transformation. Well, there's absolutely no way to accomplish that. If I try to create a new Data Source, the only options that appear to me are CSV, SQL query and Database Table. I also tried to upload the Kettle file to my user`s repository, but when the uploading finishes, nothing changes (the file isn't there) and there's no error message.
After searching through this problem, I came to know that CDA should provide this sort of cross-integration. It took a while for me to realize that CDA was already installed in my system, so I added the CDA samples, which worked fine. So, my BA server does execute Kettle transformation, but I don't get to create my own. I then considered that I should firts create a report that included the transformation before going straight to BA, but that was another frustrated attempt. When I add the PDI Data Source to my report at the Report Designed, it fails the Preview test without any useful error message.
The documentation available on-line is vast, but also quite confusing. Most of it refers to decommissioned versions of Pentaho components, and some of them refer to components that were not included in my package download. For example, I still don`t know if I should download the Design Studio or not, as it`s not clear to me if it has been replaced by other tools of simply left out the main package I downloaded.
Once again, I apologize if this post is out-of-scope, but I thought that after spending nearly 4 days wrestling with Pentaho's software, the least I could do was to produce a reasonably complete feedback.
Pha
I'm new to Pentaho suite, so I apologize in advance if this topic overlaps previous posts. I searched for every possible word combination I could think of, but couldn't find any answer to my issues.
I recently downloaded the Pentaho Data Integration and Business Analytics packages from Pentaho's web-site. Getting these things to run was a major pain in itself: I first downloaded the Linux 64-bit versions, but after three installation attempts, I gave up and moved to a Windows installation. On my Windows 7 machine, I experienced every type of bizarre problem when installing the packages in the Program Files directory, so I attempted an installation to the HD root (C:\Pentaho). This turned out to be the best working installation, and I call it "best working" because it's not yet fully functional, as the PDI Server does run (in none of the previous attempts I got to this point) but refuses my login attempts. It claims that the system is down for maintenance and that I should contact the administrator, while the Tomcat console reveals a number of frustrated attempts to locate a certain validation.properties file.
But beware that this is not the main motivation for this post. Regardless of the PDI server issues, I got the Kettle tool to work and managed to quickly build a UDJC transformation that fetches data from a set of files and outputs a sequence of records. The next step would be to use this transformation as a BA Data Source so that I could create nice Dashboards to display it, but I've spent the last couple of days trying to accomplish this simple step with no success.
When I login to the BA server, my intuition says that I should first create a new Data Source based on my Kettle transformation. Well, there's absolutely no way to accomplish that. If I try to create a new Data Source, the only options that appear to me are CSV, SQL query and Database Table. I also tried to upload the Kettle file to my user`s repository, but when the uploading finishes, nothing changes (the file isn't there) and there's no error message.
After searching through this problem, I came to know that CDA should provide this sort of cross-integration. It took a while for me to realize that CDA was already installed in my system, so I added the CDA samples, which worked fine. So, my BA server does execute Kettle transformation, but I don't get to create my own. I then considered that I should firts create a report that included the transformation before going straight to BA, but that was another frustrated attempt. When I add the PDI Data Source to my report at the Report Designed, it fails the Preview test without any useful error message.
The documentation available on-line is vast, but also quite confusing. Most of it refers to decommissioned versions of Pentaho components, and some of them refer to components that were not included in my package download. For example, I still don`t know if I should download the Design Studio or not, as it`s not clear to me if it has been replaced by other tools of simply left out the main package I downloaded.
Once again, I apologize if this post is out-of-scope, but I thought that after spending nearly 4 days wrestling with Pentaho's software, the least I could do was to produce a reasonably complete feedback.
Pha