Time to Update BI Tools

It’s time to test what has open source developers had worked hard to achieve in 2021 and let us play with the new version of:

Pentaho

On august 02 Pedro Alves published on his blog that Pentaho 9.2 was available.

You can download the BI server, the ETL client tool (PDI/Kettle), report designer, the metadata editor to build the query models for your users, and for your multidimensional database the schema designer and aggregation designer.

Project HOP

There is also an ETL in its 0.9 version for testing.

Knowage

On my previous post Knowage 8.0, could be run from containers downloading a docker compse scrip tfrom Github, but you can try to download its binaries from a low bandwidth link here 8.0 RC. There is also a 7.4 documentation.

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Knowage 8 CE

On july 2021 Knowage announced their 8.0 Enterprise Edition. Its a Business analytics application that uses Java 8, Tomcat 8.5 and MariaDB 10.3.

Docker

In hub.docker.com we can find the 8.1.0-SNAPSHOT for Linux/amd64 that can be run in several containers (hazelcast, knowage-python-docker, knowage-r-docker, knowage-server-docker, mariadb [5.3GB]). Support Docker documents at: https://github.com/KnowageLabs/Knowage-Server-Docker

$ git clone https://github.com/KnowageLabs/Knowage-Server-Docker.git
$ cd Knowage-Server-Docker/Knowage-Server-Docker

$ docker-compose up -d

And then open a browser at

http://localhost:8080/knowage

The predefined users are:

UserPassword
biadminbiadmin
bidevbidev
biuserbiuser

Use the plus sign icon to add your data source, BIRT or Jasper report .

Notes:

  • There is a main Menu UI explanation. The Dashboard editing is a lot friendly that the one available in Pentaho CE.
  • EE only features:
    1. Big data connectors
    2. Talend ETL. This is a a show stopper for me. Maybe an open source ETL like PDI, Hop or similar can be connected to use as part of workflows or datasources.
    3. There is also a documentation note that states that cockpit/Charts/GIS creation, that was one big advantage over other open source suites is now only available in EE.
    4. Scheduling seems to be available in CE that was previously restricted to EE, but Email remains EE only.

To delete this playground (and all images) then use:

$ docker-compose down
$ docker rmi -f $(docker images -a -q)

Community Edition

To access the code for the community edition get to the ow2 projects page where you can check the news, documentation and releases.

For Knowage we can find links plus individual applications:

Knowage Suite 6.x CE

I found Spago BI version 5.1, that is about two years ago. It was a Complete Open Source BI Sotution, the only one there is, they said. They were proud of it!. And I was waiting for 5.3 to start a series of posts as they announced amazing changes.

On may 4th 2017, @SpagoBI anounced they were starting a #spagobirevolution. The same company (Engineering Group) did an extreme makeover to XU experince and released a Comunity Edition (CE) and an Enterprise Edition (EE) with a Knowage Brand.

What I have seen is that the CE is an interesting product, somewhat crippled as important functionality like scheduling and MDX calculated fields and more are excluded, but lets hope its cockpit designer, metadata, models and widgets, deliver a promising alternative for OS BI data exploration.

Knowage6

Check their overview

Visit their site: http://knowage-suite.com/

Install notes

[Updated on June and December 2017, and May 2018, Sptember 2018]
Knowage has updated its documentation with instructions for windows, linux and DB migration scripts from 5.x [link].

Prerequisites: You’ll need Java JDK 1.8 and JAVA_HOME defined.

  1. Download the Knowage Installer [download page]
    Knowage-6_2_0-CE-Installer-20180809.zip [2.8GB from knowage-suite.com]
    Knowage-6_2_0-RC-CE-Installer-Unix-20180509.zip [2.9GB from one server in ow2]
    Knowage-6_1_1-CE-Installer-Unix-20171213.zip [2.3GB]
    Knowage-6.0.0-CE-Installer-Unix-20170623.zip [1.078GB]
    All-in-One-Knowage-6.0.0_RC_CE_20170429.zip [798mb]
  2. Open a Terminal, create a folder, unzip its content:
    mkdir Knowage6
    cd Knowage6
    cp ../dowloads/Knowage-6_2_0-RC-CE-Installer-Unix-20190509.zip Knowage.zip
    unzip Knowage
    chmod 777 Knowage-6_2_0-RC-CE-Installer-Unix-20180509.sh
    ./Knowage-6_2_0-RC-CE-Installer-Unix-20180509.sh
  3. Run the installer, it will:
    a. Open a welcome dialog. click Next.
    b. Ask if you accept the license agreement. Do it so and click Next.
    c. Ask for your preference on a charting library. Accept the default and click Next.
    d. Ask for six modules to be installed. If all are selected, Click Next.
    e. Select a destination folder. I selected HOME$/knowage6 it will create a Knowage-Server-CE folder.
    f. It will ask for your MySql credentials: jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/, user and password.
       Version 6.1.1 contains MariaDB files, I used my existing version without problems.
       It said that two schemas: kwowage-ce and foodmart-demo will be created

    The installer will extract the server, the .war files and update the database.
    In the final dialog unselect all and click finish to end the installer.

  4. I modified the startup and shutdown scripts to set the correct path to java:
    cd $HOME/Knowage6/Knowage-Server-CE/bin
    gedit startup.sh
    [add your JRE path to the first line like:]
    export JRE_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64"

    save your script and repeat for shutdown.sh

  5. You might want to increase the session time out from the default 30 minutes.
    Then you should edit ./HOME$/Knowage6/Knowage-Server-CE/conf/web.xml

    <session-config>
      <session-timeout>90</session-timeout>
    </session-config>
    
  6. If you used your MySql/MariaDB instance, you can delete three files:
    rm $HOME/Knowage6/Knowage-Server-CE/webapps/mariadb-10*
  7. Start your tomcat server:
    cd $HOME/Knowage6/Knowage-Server-CE/bin/
    ./startup.sh
    
  8. Start yor browser and set it to:
    http://localhost:8080/knowage

You will find examples on the left menu, enjoy.

If you have problems with the server you can check your ./logs folder.