Prerequisites

At this point, you should have already outlined your business problems and commenced a project to solve them through business intelligence software. You should expect to budget an hour to perform the initial evaluation, which includes installing the Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition 3.6.0, creating a data-driven report in Report Designer using the included sample data, and working with ad hoc reporting in the Pentaho User Console.

If at any time you run into a technical problem that is not covered in this guide, contact your Pentaho sales representative for pre-sales support.

The Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition includes an application server, sample data in an HSQLDB database, and a pre-configured MySQL database instance that will hold sample reports, schedules, and program settings. This package is not functionally different from the Enterprise Edition version that you would likely deploy to a production environment. Pentaho Enterprise Edition customers also have access to a manual deployment package that enables sysadmins to build their own Pentaho BI Server Web application for an existing production application server and database. So if your company is purely an Oracle or PostgreSQL shop, you won't be forced to use MySQL.

For evaluation purposes, you will be installing the application server, database, and client tools on the same machine. In a production installation, you would ordinarily install the client tools on workstation machines, and the BI Server on a dedicated server. The unified system requirements are explained below.

Note: The BI Suite supports common enterprise authentication technologies such as LDAP, Active Directory, Central Authentication Service (single sign-on), and existing JDBC user account tables in other databases. However, configuring the BI Suite to work with third-party authentication services is beyond the scope of this guide. Contact your Pentaho sales representative if you need further assistance with more sophisticated evaluation scenarios.