The route that you take depends on different levels of expertise, what your unique business needs are, the data that you are using, and business interests when it comes to analyzing, reporting, and working with your data. You might find that you travel one track, and then the other, during your evaluation of Pentaho.
All of the products are integrated to work smoothly together, regardless of which track you ultimately choose. We provide specific details within the workflow discussions, however, here are the high-level use cases for each track.
- Business Analytics (BA) Track: Great for analysis and reporting. Meant primarily for business users and does not require special skills to successfully use the components involved. This track enables anyone to build Pentaho solutions without using programming or having deep understanding of data structures.
- Data Integration (DI) Track: Meant for data design professionals and requires a working knowledge of data structures and modeling, as well as extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. With this track, you can directly manipulate data from multiple sources, making it scalable and efficient for enterprise-wide analysis and reporting.
Each track has three workflows: one for Evaluation, one for Development, and one for Production.
- Evaluate and Learn: If you used the trial download on the Pentaho website and want to get a hands-on feel for the components that are best for your implementation, follow the Evaluation Workflow.
- Develop Pentaho Solutions: After you have figured out which components are best for you and how to use them, the Develop Workflow is the process you use to build, change, and test Pentaho solutions until they meet your production requirements.
- Go Live for Production: When your solution is working just right, the Go Live Workflow shows how to move your solution from development to production.