Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Reviews

We use it as an ETL tool. We take data from a source database and move it into a target database. We do some additional processing on our target databases as well, and then load the data into a data warehouse for reports. The end result is a data warehouse and the reports built on top of that.

We are a consulting company and we implement it for clients.

As a result of one of the projects that we did in the Middle East, we achieved the main goal of fully digitalizing their population census. They did previous censuses doing door-to-door surveys, but for the last census, using Pentaho Data Integration, we managed to get it all running in a fully digital way, with nothing on paper forms. No one had to go door-to-door and survey the people.

One of the valuable features is the ability to use PL/SQL statements inside the data transformations and jobs.

I would like to see support for some additional cloud sources - Azure, Snowflake.

I have been using Hitachi Lumada Data Integration for four years.

There have been some bugs and some weird things every now and then, but it is mostly fairly stable.

If you work with relatively small data sets, it's all okay. But if you are going to use really huge data sets, then you might get into a bit of trouble, at least from what I have seen.

The support from Hitachi is not the greatest, the fixing of bugs can take a really long time.

Neutral

The initial setup is very straightforward compared to many other ETL tools. It takes about half a day.

We have about five users, altogether. There are two to three developers, one to two customer people who run the ETLs and one to two admins who take care of the environment itself. It doesn't require much maintenance. Occasionally someone has to restart the server or take a look at logs.

Because you can basically get Pentaho Data Integration for free, I would give the cost versus performance a pretty good rating.

Taking the census project that I mentioned earlier as an example (Pentaho Data Integration was not the only contributor though, it was just one part of the whole solution) the statistical authority managed to save huge amounts of money by making the census electronic, versus the traditional version.

You don't need the Enterprise Edition, you can go with the Community Edition. That way you can use it for free and, for free, it's a pretty good tool to use. 

If you pay for licenses, the only thing that you're getting, in addition, is customer support, which is pretty much nonexistent in any case. I would recommend going with the Community Edition.

I have had experience with other solutions, but for the last project we did not evaluate other options. Because we had previous experience with Pentaho Data Integration, it was pretty much a no-brainer to use it.

Hitachi Vantara's roadmap is promising. They came up with Lumada and it seems that they do have some ideas on how to make their product a bit more attractive than it currently is.

I'm fairly satisfied with using Pentaho Data Integration. It's more or less okay. When it comes to all the other parts, like Pentaho reports and Pentaho dashboards, things could be better there.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that a cheap, open-source tool can sometimes be even more efficient than some of the high-priced enterprise ETL tools. Overall, the solution is okay, considering the low cost. It has all of the main things that you would expect it to have, from a technical perspective.

We run the payment systems for Canada. We use it as a typical ETL tool to transfer and modify data into a data warehouse. We have many different pipelines that we have built with it.

I love the fact that we haven't come up with a problem yet that we haven't been able to address with this tool. I really appreciate its maturity and the breadth of its capabilities.

If we did not have this tool, we would probably have to use a whole different variety of tools, then our environment would be a lot more complicated.

We develop metadata pipelines and use them.

Flexible deployment, in any environment, is very important to us. That is the key reason why we ended up with these tools. Because we have a very highly secure environment, we must be able to install it in multiple environments on multiple different servers. The fact that we could use the same tool in all our environments, on-prem and in the cloud, was very important to us. 

Because it comes from an open-source background, it has so many different plugins. It is just extremely broad in what it can do. I appreciate that it has a very broad, wide spectrum of things that it can connect to and do. It has been around for a while, so it is mature and has a lot of things built into it. That is the biggest thing. 

The visual nature of its development is a big plus. You don't need to have very strong developers to be able to work with it.

We often have to drop down to JavaScript, but that is fine. I appreciate that it has the capability built-in. When you need to, you can drop down to a scripting language. This is important to us.

The documentation is very basic.

The testing and quality could really improve. Every time that there is a major release, we are very nervous about what is going to get broken. We have had a lot of experience with that, as even the latest one was broken. Some basic things get broken. That doesn't look good for Hitachi at all. If there is one place I would advise them to spend some money and do some effort, it is with the quality. It is not that hard to start putting in some unit tests so basic things don't get broken when they do a new release. That just looks horrible, especially for an organization like Hitachi.

Overall, I have been using it for about 10 years. At my current organization, I have been using it for about seven years. It was used a little bit at my previous organization as well.

The stability is not great, especially when you start patching it a lot because things get broken. That is not a great look. When you start patching, you are expecting things to get fixed, not new things to get broken.

With modern programming, you build a lot of automated testing around your solution, and it is specifically for that. I changed this piece of code. Well, what else got broken? Obviously they don't have a lot of unit tests built into their code. They need to start doing that because it looks horrible when they change one thing, then two other things get broken. Then, they released that as a commercial product, which is horrible. Last time, somehow they broke the ability to connect with databases. That is something incredibly basic. How could you release this product without even testing for that?

We don't have a huge amount of data, so I can't really answer how we could scale up to very large solutions.

Lumada’s ability to quickly and effectively solve issues we have brought up is not great. We have a service for the solution with Hitachi. I don't get the sense that Pentaho, and Hitachi still calls it Pentaho, is a huge center of focus for them. 

You kind of get help, but the people from whom you get help aren't necessarily super strong. It often goes around in circles forever. I eventually have to find my own solution. 

I haven't found that the Hitachi support site has a depth of understanding for the solution. They can answer simple questions, but when it gets more in-depth, they have a lot of trouble answering questions. I don't think the support people have the depth of expertise to really deal with difficult questions.

I would rate them as five out of 10. They are responsive and polite. I don't feel ignored or anything like that, just the depth of knowledge isn't there.

Neutral

It has always been here. There was no solution like it until I got to the company.

The initial setup was complex because we had to integrate with SAML. Even though they had some direction on that, it was really a do-it-yourself kind of thing. That was pretty complicated, so if they want to keep this product fresh, I think they have to work on making it integrate more with modern technology, like single sign-on and stuff like that. Every organization has that now and Pentaho doesn't have a good story for that. However, it is the platform that they don't give a lot of love to.

It took us a long time to figure it out, something like two weeks.

This has reduced our ETL development time. If it wasn't for this solution, we would be doing custom coding. The reason why we are using the solution is because of its simplicity of development.

The cost of these types of solutions are expensive. So, we really appreciate what we get for our money. Though, we don't think of the solution as a top-of-the-line solution or anything like that.

Apache has a project going on called Apache Hop. Because Pentaho was open sourced, people have taken and forged it. They are really modernizing the solution. As far as I know, Hitachi is not involved yet. I would highly advise them to get involved in that open-source project. It will be the next generation of Pentaho. If they get left behind, they're not going to have anything. It would be a very bad move to just ignore it. Hitachi should not ignore Apache Hop.

I really like the data integration tool. However, it is part of a whole platform of tools, and it is obvious the other tools just don't get a lot of love. We are in it for Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) because that is what we want as our ETL tool. We use their reporting platform and stuff like that, but it is obvious that they just don't get a lot of love or concern.

I haven't looked at the roadmap that much. We are also a Google customer using BigQuery, etc. Hitachi is really just a very niche part of what we do. Therefore, we are not generally looking very seriously at what Hitachi is doing with their products nor a big investor in what Hitachi is doing.

I would recommend this specific Hitachi product to a friend or colleague, depending on their use case and need. If they have a very similar need, I would recommend it. I wouldn't be saying, "Oh, this is the best thing next to sliced bread," but say, "Hey, if this is what you need, this works well for us."

On a scale of one to 10 for recommending the product, I would rate it as seven out of 10. Overall, I would also rate it as seven out of 10.

We really appreciated the breadth of its capabilities. It is not the top-of-the-line solution, but you really get a lot for what you pay for.

We use it to connect to multiple databases and generate reporting. We also have ETL processes running on it.

Portions of it are in AWS, but we also have desktop access.

The solution has allowed us to automate reporting by automating its scheduling. 

It is also important to us that the solution enables you to leverage metadata to automate data pipeline templates and reuse them. It allows us to generate reports with fewer resources.

If we didn't have this solution, we wouldn't be able to manage our workload or generate the volume of reporting that we currently do. It's very important for us that it provides a single, end-to-end data management experience from ingestion to insights. We are a high-volume department and without those features, we wouldn't be able to manage the current workload.

We're using the PDI and the repository function, and they give us the ability to easily generate reporting and output, and to access data. We also like the ability to schedule.

Since Hitachi took over, I don't feel that the documentation is as good within the solution. It used to have very good help built right in. There's good documentation when you go to the site but the help function within the solution hasn't been as good since Hitachi took over.

I've been using Lumada Data Integration since 2016, but the company has been using it much longer.

We are currently on version 8.3, but we're going to be doing an upgrade to 9.2 next month.

The stability is good. We haven't had any issues related to Pentaho.

Its scalability is very good. We use it with multiple, large databases. We've added to it over time and it scales.

We have about 10 users of the solution including a data quality manager, clinical analyst, healthcare informatics analysts, senior healthcare informatics analyst, and an analytics team leader. It's used very extensively by all of those job roles in their day-to-day work. When we add additional staff members, they routinely get access to and are trained on the solution.

Their ability to quickly and effectively solve issues we have brought up is very good. They have a ticketing system and they're very responsive to any tickets we enter. And that's true not only for issues but if we have questions about functionality.

Positive

The solution is very flexible. It's pretty easy to set up connections within the solution.

Maintenance isn't required day-to-day. Our technical staff does the upgrades. They also, on occasion, have to do things like restarting the services, but that's typically related to server issues, not Pentaho itself.

My advice would be to take advantage of the training that's offered.

The query performance of Lumada on large data sets is good, but the query performance is really only as good as the server.

In terms of Hitachi's roadmap, we haven't seen it in a little while. We did have a concern that they're going to be going away from Pentaho and rolling it into another product and we're not quite sure what the result of that is going to be. We don't have a good understanding of what's going to change. That's the concern.

We currently only use Pentaho. We don't have other Hitachi products but we're satisfied with it. We would recommend Pentaho.

We have an event planning system, which enables us to obtain a large report. It includes data Mart or data warehouse data. This is where we take data from the IT online system and pass it to the data warehouse. Then, from the data warehouse, they generate reports. We have 6 developers who are using the Panel Data Integrator, but there are no end users. We deploy the product, and the customer uses it for reporting. We have one person who undertakes a regular maintenance activity when it is required.

As we are a software company, we are using the tools provided with the Pentaho Data Integration for our various teams.

Pentaho Data Integration is quite simple to learn, and there is a lot of information available online. It is not a steep learning curve. It also integrates easily with other databases and that is great. We use the provided documentation, which is a simple process for integration compared to other proprietary tools.

I don't think they market it that well. We can make suggestions for improvements but they don't seem to take the feedback on board. This contrasts with Informatica who are really helpful and seem to listen more to their customer feedback. I would also really like to see improved data capture. At the moment the emphasis seems to be on data processing. I would like to see a real-time processing data integration tool. This would provide instant reporting whenever the data changes. I'm still in the very recent stage concerning Pentaho Data Integration, but it can't really handle what I describe as "extreme data processing" i.e. when there is a huge amount of data to process. That is one area where Pentaho is still lacking.

We have been using Pentaho Data Integration for 6 years. The customer is using Mirabilis Cloud, which is a public cloud. We are currently using version A.3.

Technical Support is really good. To get our answers only takes a little bit of time.

One of our customers was completely into the Microsoft core framework. We have to use SSIS because it's readily available with them, and is part of the system. We had to use it for five years. 

As mentioned, one of our teams has worked with Informatica in the past. In terms of integration, Informatica isn't more powerful, but more accurate in some aspects. The community is also quite strong.

The setup of Pentaho Data Integration is straightforward. 

We implemented Pentaho Data Integration in-house. The current deployment has taken three months for the current set of requirements. We have another deployment in the pipeline where we are connecting other different data sources. These projects usually take a few months to complete.

Sometimes we provide the licenses or the customer can procure their own licenses. Previously, we had an enterprise license. Currently, we are on a community license as this is adequate for our needs.

For newcomers to the product, it is best to start with something simple. You can then scale it up fast as it is not a steep learning curve. If somebody wants to set up a good inbound integration platform, they can use the Panel Data Integrator. It's really simple and easy to use. The online community really helps you with numerous issues, such as licensing and a lot of other things. I would rate Pentaho Data Integration 8 out of 10.

We are using just the simple features of this product.

We're using it as a data warehouse and then for building dimensions.

The shortcoming in version 7 is that we are unable to connect to Google Cloud Storage (GCS), where I can write the results from Pentaho. I'm able to connect to S3 using Pentaho 8, but when using it for GCS, I'm unable to connect. With people moving from on-premises deployments to the cloud, be it S3, Azure, or Google, we need a plugin where we can interact with these cloud vendors.

I would like to see improvements made for real-time data processing. It is something that I will be looking out for.

We have been using Pentaho Data Integration for three years.

For all of the features that we have been using, it is a stable product.

In terms of data loading and processes, the scalability is good.

We have a team of four people who are using it for analytics.

As we are using the Community Version, we have not been in contact with technical support. Instead, we rely on forums and websites when we need to resolve a problem.

In the past, I have worked with Talend, as well as SAP BO Data Services (BODS). However, that was with another company. This organization started with Pentaho and we are still using it.

It is a straightforward setup process. It took between three and four hours to complete.

We are using the Community Version, which is available free of charge.

The price of the regular version is not reasonable and it should be lower.

My advice for anybody who is researching this product is that if they want to do batch processing, then this is a good choice. The amount of data that it loads and processes is good.

Based on the features that I have used and my experience, I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We basically receive information from our clients via Excel. We take this information and transform it in order to create some data marks.

With this information, on these processes we are running right now, we receive new data every day. The solution processes the Excels and creates a data mark for them.

While we read the data and transform it as well as put it in a database, in order to explore the information, we need an analytics solution for that - and that is typically Microsoft's solution, Power BI.

Running itself with the ETL was very fast. It makes it so that it is very easy to transform the information we have. We found that very useful. 

The UI is very easy to understand and learn.

The solution offers lots of documentation.

The initial setup is easy.

It's my understanding that the product can scale.

We've found the solution to be stable. 

The product is free to use if you choose the free version.

The solution needs better, higher-quality documentation, similar to AWS. Right now, we find that although documentation exists, it's not easy to find the answers we seek.

I have tried some cloud services with the ETL, so perhaps that would be good to add.

The product needs more plugins. Right now, it just has a standard database connection and there are other solutions there that can have straightforward connections for Oracle, MySQL, and stuff like that. However, more plugins would make it a much better product.

We recently finished two projects with Pentaho.

The product is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

According to the documentation, it's quite scalable. That said, I haven't tried to expand it. We just use a single server and that's all we need right now. We don't have plans to increase usage.

We have three people who use the solution currently.

We don't really use support. We tend to do everything on our own and solve any problems we have ourselves. We basically have just read the manuals and that's about it. 

The initial setup is not complex or difficult. It's straightforward. 

The deployment process takes about two weeks. 

We had two people who handled the deployment process. They were an AWS DevOps person and a Pentaho expert.

We do not pay any license costs. We use a free version of the product.

I'm a consultant and an end-user.

I downloaded the latest version of the solution. I can't speak to the version number. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

The most common use for the solution is gathering data from our databases or files in order to gather them into a different database. Another common use is to compare data between different databases. Due to a lack of integrity, you can attach these to synchronization issues.

One important feature, in my opinion, is the Metadata Injection. It gives flexibility to the scripts due to the fact that the scripts don't depend on a fixed structure or a fixed data model. Instead, you can develop transformations that are not dependant on the fixed structure or data models. 

Let me give a pair of examples. Sometimes your tables change, adding fields or dropping some of them. When this happens if you have a transformation without using Metadata Injection your transformation fails or doesn't manage the whole info from the table. If you use Metadata Injection instead, the new fields are included and the dropped columns are excluded from the transformation. Other times you have a complex transformation to apply to a lot of different tables. Traditionally, without the Metadata Injection feature, you had to repeat the transformation for each table, adapting the transformation to the concrete structure of each table. Fortunately, with the Metadata Injection, the same transformation is valid for all the tables you want to treat. A little bit effort gives you a great benefit.

Furthermore, the solution has a free to use community version.

The solution is easy to set up, very intuitive, clear to understand and easy to maintain.

I'm currently looking at a new competitor that's got some interesting features that this solution doesn't have. I have found this competitor has a feature braking system that is not present in the Pentaho Data Integration approach. The way their system sets can somehow maintain a track for the last executions and store the state which gives you the potential to run from the point that it ended the last time. It's very interesting. It would be nice if Pentaho had this type of feature.

Often you are required to install plugins. If you need to have access to, in my case, Neo4j databases new folder databases, you do need a plugin to do it.

Between my current role and the role at my last company, I've been working with the solution for over five years.

It's not very stable, at least not in the case of the community edition. I'm working with the community edition right now and I think perhaps it is because of that it is not very stable, it causes the system to sometimes hang. I'm not sure if this is the case for pair tiers.

I am the only person using the solution currently. There are two other people that occasionally also assist in it. I'm helping them understand the tool and they are beginning to use it. In that sense, we're slowly scaling.

I don't know if the solution scales well on a large scale, however.

It scales very well, overall with the very useful feature to run n copies to Start attribute in every step, perhaps balancing with the side effect of consuming a lot of memory and CPU resources.

We haven't really contacted technical support in the past. We try to handle any issues ourselves in-house. I can't speak to the quality of the technical support, having never directly dealt with them.

We've never really used another solution like this in our organization. This is the first.

The solution is pretty simple to set up. It's not complex.

For our, deployment took about one month.

Maintenance is easy. The only maintenance tasks are to upgrade to the newer versions and backing up the repository frequently.

I handled the implementation on my own. I didn't need any help from a reseller or consultant.

We're using the community edition, which is free to use. I'm not sure how much their paid services cost. We haven't purchased any licensing.

We're just users of the solution. We don't have a professional relationship with the company.

The solution is great to use and easy to share with teams via the central repository. It's very functional overall. I'd recommend the solution to other companies.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Developed ETL processes to load a data warehouse. Has improved our data integration capabilities.

• Easy to use
• Development of the product
• A lot of predefined steps
• Good open source option

There is not a data quality or MDM solution in the Pentaho DI suite.

No issues.

I could not connect to our Hadoop environment in an easy and flexible way, and it was important to scale our data warehouse.

I work with the Community Edition, therefore I do not have support. There was an issue that I could not resolve with community support.

I switched from our previous solution for cost reasons.

It was not complex.

There is a good open source option (Community Edition).

No.

There is a lack of support if you work with the Community Edition.