Develop Your BA Environment
The Develop Your BA Environment workflow outlines the processes that you use to set up and configure your BA development server, and to build, change, and test Pentaho solutions until they meet your unique business requirements. This process is similar to the Trial Download Evaluation experience, except that you will be completely configuring the BA Server and working with your own report designers and data scientists, as well as Pentaho professional services. The end result of this is to learn BA implementation best practices and deploy your BA solution to a production server.
Before you begin developing your BA environment, we recommend that you attend Pentaho training classes to learn how to install and configure the BA server, as well as how to develop data models and applications.
This section is grouped into five parts that guide you along the happy path for the development of your BA environment.
Set Up Your BA Server
During this portion, you verify that the hardware and software requirements are met, install the software, and configure the BA Server and BA Design tools.
Task | Do This | Notes |
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Verify System Requirements |
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Obtain Software and Install BA |
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Change the BA Server Fully Qualified URL | If you are going to have many machines pointing to one server, make sure you change the fully qualified URL.
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Configure the BA Server |
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Configure BA Design Tools | If you plan to use BA Design Tools, make sure you do these tasks. Otherwise, skip this step.
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Import Data Sources and Data Models
This section guides you through the process of creating data sources that are ideal for agile development of your BA solution.
Task | Do This | Notes |
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Choose Data Source Types |
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Create Data Sources and Models |
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Create Database Table Data Sources |
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Create Reports and Further Refine Data Models
We recommend that you work with data scientists and business analysts at this stage of the process to achieve the best results. As you get ready to move to production, we recommend that you use data sources created using either Schema Workbench or Metadata Editor.
Task | Do This | Notes |
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Create Analysis Reports, Interactive Reports, and Dashboards |
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Create a Report with Report Designer |
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Refine Your Data Source Model |
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Test Environment Quality
If you have decided to perform quality assurance testing, upload your content to the BA repository, then download it to the QA server. Some organizations have an additional layer of User Acceptance Testing that is performed after QA testing is complete.
Next Steps
- Investigate Security - decide which security solution works best for your business environment.
- Learn about Scheduling - decide which schedules to set up on your production server.
- Think about what content you want to move to your production server.
- Prepare to Go Live for Production.