Schema WorkBench

Introduction

Pentaho Business Analytics, is an enterprise-level business intelligence and data analytics platform that helps organizations transform raw data into actionable insights. The platform combines data integration, OLAP services, reporting, dashboarding, and data mining capabilities in a unified suite.

Notable for its open-source foundations and commercial enterprise edition, Pentaho enables organizations to perform complex data analysis, create interactive visualizations, and generate detailed reports through both traditional and modern big data sources.

The platform supports various data sources and can integrate with popular databases and big data technologies like Hadoop, offering both on-premises and cloud deployment options.

By the end of the workshops, you will have a comprehensive understanding of:

Schema Workbench

The Pentaho Schema Workbench is a visual design tool used to create and edit Mondrian OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) schemas that enable multidimensional analysis of data. It provides a graphical interface for defining cubes, dimensions, hierarchies, levels, and measures that form the foundation of OLAP analysis and reporting.

Users can map these multidimensional structures to underlying relational database tables, establish dimension hierarchies (such as Year > Quarter > Month > Day), define calculated members using MDX (Multidimensional Expressions), and configure aggregation strategies to optimize query performance. The Schema Workbench includes features for testing MDX queries directly against the schema, validating schema definitions, and previewing cube data to ensure the model behaves as expected.

The schemas created in this tool are saved as XML files and deployed to Pentaho servers, where they power interactive OLAP analysis through tools like Pentaho Analyzer and JPivot, allowing business users to perform sophisticated slice-and-dice operations, drill-down analysis, and create pivot tables without understanding the underlying data warehouse complexity.

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