Pentaho has a very rich and complete business analytics product suite. There is ETL, data integration, data orchestration, operational reporting, dashboards, BI developer tools, predictive analytics, OLAP analytics … and I’m probably missing a few others!

So when you are looking to implement a business intelligence and analytics solution for a Big Data platform using a modern technology outside of the traditional RDBMS sphere, like MongoDB NoSQL database, you have the advantage of a complete BI product set that works out-of-the-box to take advantage of that platform’s strengths.

What I mean by that is with Pentaho, there are different tools to optimize each aspect of a complete BI solutions. For instance, Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) has direct hooks into MongoDB using their API directly to manipulate and move data using MongoDB documents. The Pentaho Report Designer (PRD) also uses that same direct access mechanism to provide reporting for your business users directly on MongoDB.

With the Pentaho 5.1 BA Suite Release, interactive OLAP analytics using Pentaho Analyzer was introduced. This is Pentaho’s unique capability to translate business user queries using slice-and-dice MDX mechanisms directly into MongoDB AggPipeline queries.

With these capabilities, Pentaho does not require extracting and staging of MongoDB data from documents in collections into traditional RDBMS tables. Instead, analytics is turned into native MongoDB query syntax on the fly without any SQL requirements. And as I stated above, this allows the user to fully leverage and optimize your Big Data source, in this case MongoDB. Pentaho will push down queries into your MongoDB cluster, thereby not requiring you to establish an entirely separate analytics platform with its own hardware and scalability requirements.