Analytic Databases
Analytic databases are a rapidly growing category of relational database management systems designed for high scalability and performance for big data, and provide very fast query performance when used as data stores for query-intensive applications such as business intelligence. Pentaho Business Analytics offers unparalleled native relational OLAP analysis and data integration support for a variety of analytic databases through native SQL generation for fast analytics and native bulk loader integration for fast data integration.
Analytic databases use a variety of technical approaches to achieve high performance analysis of big data including:
- Massively parallel processing (MPP) - Distributed processing across a cluster of commodity processors and servers
- Column oriented databases - A database management system (DBMS) that stores its content by column rather than by row, creating significant performance advantages for data marts/warehouses where aggregates are computed over large numbers of similar data items
- Data warehouse appliances - An integrated set of servers, storage, operating system and database software specifically pre-installed and pre-optimized for data warehousing
Native Support for Optimal Big Data Performance
Pentaho goes the extra mile for many analytic databases by offering database-specific native support for one or both of the following:
- Native SQL dialects - Goes beyond ANSI standard SQL to enable utilization of database-specific query features that often result in significant performance benefits
- Native bulk loaders - Utilities provided by many database vendors to load data (typically from flat files) with very high performance; much faster than can be achieved using SQL
Visual Development
Pentaho provides a rich visual user interface for loading, extracting and transforming data with high-performance analytic databases. This includes the capability to load data – often using the database's native bulk loader utility that provides extremely high performance parallel loading of large volumes of data.
Pentaho’s visual interfaces allows IT and data scientists to work with analytic databases using a familiar and less complex extract-transform-load (ETL) approach, instead of hand-coding scripts for loading, transforming and extracting data.
Visual Job Orchestration
Pentaho provides an intuitive visual user interface for orchestration of data processing and data integration jobs for analytic database stores and other data stores. This enables easy configuration of scheduled jobs, as well as more complex job execution logic such as events, triggers and conditional logic.
Pentaho provides a comprehensive set of steps to develop and orchestrate a big data job. A sample of these steps are listed below.
Supported Analytic Database Platforms
Pentaho's unparalleled native for analytic databases includes:
- Greenplum Database
- HP NonStop SQL/MX
- HP Vertica
- IBM Netezza
- Infobright
- Actian Vectorwise
- LucidDB
- MonetDB
- Teradata
- Teradata Aster
Please contact Pentaho for the most recent list of analytic database platforms.