On Wednesday I and many others attended the Better Together tour at the IOD in London. There were lots of interesting things mentioned, and I hope to post again on this – but this is primarily about Bywaters.
Details of the tour are here: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pentaho-kicks-off-better-together-tour-in-london-in-association-with-mongodb-248150031.html
And there is also a case study for bywaters here: http://events.pentaho.com/rs/pentaho/images/bywaters_casestudy.pdf
Bywaters is a great case and somewhere I worked for a few weeks. What makes them so interesting is two things:
- Sasha is incredible enthusiastic about Pentaho, and at one point called PDI “The most significant development in the IT industry in the last decade.”
- Their solution is picture perfect.
What do I mean about that last point? Well everything they do is done right, and they get the best out of the entire Pentaho platform. They’ve also done it with a minimum of Professional assistance.
So; They use PDI for the data extraction – a relatively simple set of transformations that do have to do the usual bit of data cleaning and enrichment. The transformations run frequently so the data is up to date – and typically only take 10-20s to complete.
They also use PDI for near real time SMS alerts – Quite nice!
Anyway, PDI populates a proper star schema in an incremental fashion. Tick! Another good point.
There’s then a Mondrian cube which quite a complex security framework most of which is maintained automatically by another PDI job. (Devised by Nelson – see his talk at PCM13 for details!)
Then on the front end a combination of Analyzer, PRD and CTools is used to build a custom solution that is dedicated to their customers.
All in all a very nice solution – No hacks, Nothing unnecessarily complex – just the perfect BI implementation – and its great to see Sasha and the team now reaping those rewards!
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