Pentaho has open sourced its big data offering as part of the Pentaho Kettle 4.3 release announced this week. This move sees the company move the metadata-driven Kettle Extraction Transformation Loading (ETL) engine to the Apache License, version 2.0. Given Apache's stamp on Hadoop and several of the leading NoSQL databases, Pentaho is positioning this move as a positive shift towards big data for Kettle itself.
Pentaho Kettle 4.3 will now include big data functions such as the ability to input, output, manipulate, and report on data using the following Hadoop and NoSQL stores: Cassandra, Hadoop HDFS, Hadoop MapReduce, Hadapt, HBase, Hive, HPCC Systems, and MongoDB. The product also makes available job orchestration steps for Hadoop, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Pentaho MapReduce, HDFS File Operations, and Pig scripts.
The company says that all major Hadoop distributions are supported including: Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Apache Hadoop, Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH), EMC Greenplum HD, HortonWorks Data Platform powered by Apache Hadoop, and MapR's M3 Free and M5 Edition.
Pentaho Kettle can execute ETL transforms outside the Hadoop cluster or within the nodes of the cluster, taking advantage of Hadoop's distributed processing and reliability. The product offers what is labeled as "at least a 10x boost in productivity" for developers through visual tools that eliminate the need to write code such as Hadoop MapReduce Java programs, Pig scripts, Hive queries, or NoSQL database queries and scripts.
According to Pentaho's product announcement, the new release makes big data platforms usable for a huge breadth of developers, whereas previously big data platforms were "usable only by the geekiest of geeks" with deep developer skills such as the ability write Java MapReduce jobs and Pig scripts.
Pentaho says that this new release provides an on-ramp to the full data discovery and visualization capabilities of Pentaho Business Analytics, including reporting, dashboards, interactive data analysis, data mining, and predictive analysis.
