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Hitachi Vantara Lumada and Pentaho Documentation

Develop Your BA Environment

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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.

Table 1. BA Server Set Up Checklist
Task Do This Notes
Verify System Requirements
  • Acquired one or more servers that meet the requirements.
  • Obtained the correct drivers for your system.
Obtain Software and Install BA
  • Get the software from your Sales Support representative.
  • Installed the software - we recommend using the installation wizard.
  • Accessed the User Console, toured the Administration page, and changed the default administrator password.
If you need to, see the next segment to change the fully qualified URL for the BA Server.
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.
  • Changed the URL and verified that you can connect to it.
Configure the BA Server
  • Added all relevant Pentaho licenses.
  • Set up your data connections.
  • Configured an email server through the Administration page.
  • Understand how to manage schedules through the Schedules page. These will be set up during the production phase.
Configure BA Design Tools If you plan to use BA Design Tools, make sure you do these tasks. Otherwise, skip this step.
  • Configured your BA Design Tools.
  • Specified the data connections required for each tool.
We recommend that you NOT configure these tools on your production server. Rather, configure them here, test them, then migrate them over to production.

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.

Table 2. Data Sources and Data Models Checklist
Task Do This Notes
Choose Data Source Types
  • Review the information about Data Sources.
  • Examine the differences between the different data models - relational data models vs. multidimensional data models.
Create Data Sources and Models
  • Understand how the BA Server and Data Source Wizard work together to create usable data sources and data models.
Create Database Table Data Sources
  • Create Data Sources and preliminary data models using the Data Source Wizard.

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.

Table 3. Create Reports and Refine Data Models Checklist
Task Do This Notes
Create Analysis Reports, Interactive Reports, and Dashboards
  • Create Interactive and Analysis reports, as well as a Dashboard.
  • Verify that the reports show the data that you want.
  • If they do not, work with data scientists to get the results you need.
Create a Report with Report Designer
  • (Optional) Create a report in Report Designer.
Refine Your Data Source Model
  • Refine data models to get the data that you want to see in your reports.
  • Create the reports again to verify the results.
  • Repeat this process as needed.

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