Pentaho Data Integration (aka Kettle) can be used for ETL but it can also be used in EII scenarios. For instance, you have a report that can be run from a customer service application that will allow the customer service agent to see the current issues/calls up to the minute (CRM database) but also give a strategic snapshot of the customer from the customer profitability and value data mart (data warehouse). You’d like to look a this on the same report that with data coming from two different systems with different Operating Systems and databases.

Kettle can make short work of this using the integration Pentaho provides and the ability to SLURP data from an ETL transform into a report without the need to persist to some temporary or staging table. The thing that Pentaho has NOT made short work of, is being able to use the visual report authoring tools (Report Designer and Report Design Wizard) to be able to use a Kettle transform as a …

The standard Pentaho demo download is super quick and easy: there’s no installation and it just works.  You double click start-pentaho.bat and then it’s running in http://localhost:8080.

However, sometimes you may want to share this demo with others.  Roland Bouman has a nice blog entry on the specifics of how to change the demo install into a server. 

I add the following line to my start-pentaho.sh to make the hostname changing transparent. 

sed -i -e “s/http:\/\/.*:8080/http:\/\/`hostname -f`:8080/” jboss/server/default/deploy/pentaho.war/WEB-INF/web.xml

This allows one to move this “pentaho” to any system and it will startup properly with the …