Pentaho Corporation has this week released its Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition 3.8 product with the assertion that the product represents the only fully integrated commercial open source BI suite that covers the full spectrum of BI needs including ETL, reporting, analysis (OLAP), dashboards, and data mining. The company says that the new release focuses on enabling developers to design BI solutions that integrate all forms of information delivery.
With this release, Pentaho says that its is moving closer to eliminating the gap between commercial open source and proprietary BI by offering the majority of the functionality provided by proprietary BI mega-vendors at a fraction of the cost.
The new functionality in Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition 3.8 includes:
- Guided analysis -- OLAP analysis and dashboards provide a means for end users to define links from one document to another, creating guided navigation paths to additional detail or related information.
- Library of design tools -- Application designers can now choose from a library of filter control types including buttons, radio groups, and calendar controls for adding interactivity to their dashboards.
- Data-less design -- This new query mode allows users to design the layout of an Analyzer report before querying the underlying database. This can help reduce database traffic and accelerate analytic report design when analyzing large amounts of data.
- Data caching -- Pentaho Reporting now includes an intelligent in-memory caching layer that improves performance when working with large, parameterized, or paginated reports.
"Pentaho BI Suite 3.8 includes a host of high value, customer-requested features that significantly reduce the technical barriers preventing end users from creating rich, interactive Business Intelligence solutions" said Ian Fyfe, chief technology evangelist for Pentaho.
