Installing Pentaho BI Server 3.5.0

The Pentaho BI Suite Community Edition [CE] is an open source business intelligence package that includes ETL, analysis, metadata, and reporting capabilities. The suite is composed of server components and client tools. The server components [also referred to as the BI Platform] consist of the BI Server, the administration console and the user console. The BI server is responsible for management and delivery of reports.

Some of the Pentaho client tools include:

• Report Designer: Used to create formatted reports. Report Designer offers far more flexibility and functionality
  than the ad hoc reporting capabilities of the Pentaho User Console.
• Design Studio: An Eclipse-based tool that enables you to hand-edit a report or analysis view
  xaction file. Generally, people use Design Studio to add modifications to an existing report that
  cannot be added with Report Designer. Design Studio is also required to enable report scheduling, e-mail distribution, dynamic and static prompting, and more.
• Metadata Editor: Enables you to add a custom metadata layer to an existing data source.
  Usually you would do this for a data source that you intend to use for analysis or reporting; it's
  not required, but it makes it easier for business users to parse the database when building a
  query.
• Pentaho Data Integration: Also known as Kettle. An extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, which enables
  you to access and prepare data sources for analysis, data mining, or reporting.
• Schema Workbench: A graphical tool that helps you create ROLAP schemas for analysis.

These steps are for setting up the server components.

Prerequisites
JRE or JDK 1.5+

Versions used
Pentaho BI Server 3.5.0
Pentaho Report Designer 3.5.0
JRE – 1.6.0.17

Steps

• Download the business intelligence server zip file from SourceForge, http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/files/
• Download the report designer zip file from the same SourceForge location
• Create a folder c:\pentaho\server and extract the BI server zip file here.
• Create a folder c:\pentaho\design-tools and extract the report designer zip file here.
• Go to Start > Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings. Select the Advanced tab and click on the Environment Variables button. Click on the new button and create a variable named JRE_HOME with the value set to the path of the JRE directory e.g. C:\Program Files\Java\jre6. If you have JDK installed, create a variable named JAVA_HOME instead with the value set to the path of the JDK directory.
• Note that the BI server package seems to come with it's own JRE which will be located in C:\Pentaho\server\biserver-ce\jre.
• Edit the file C:\Pentaho\server\biserver-ce\tomcat\bin\setclasspath.bat. Modify the first four lines of the gotJreHome label so that they appear as follows. [tools.jar comes with JDK, not JRE]

:gotJreHome
if not exist "%JRE_HOME%\bin\java.exe" goto noJavaHome
if not exist "%JRE_HOME%\bin\javaw.exe" goto noJavaHome
REM if not exist "%JRE_HOME%\lib\tools.jar" goto noJreToolsJar
REM set CLASSPATH=%JRE_HOME%\lib\tools.jar

• Edit the files start-pentaho.bat and stop-pentaho.bat located in C:\Pentaho\server\biserver-ce\. Comment out the line setting the value of the JAVA_HOME variable so that it looks as below

REM set JAVA_HOME=%_PENTAHO_JAVA_HOME%

• The preceding two steps are only required if you only have JRE and don't have JDK
• Edit the file C:\Pentaho\server\biserver-ce\pentaho-solutions\system\publisher_config.xml. Enter a password [in clear text] in the element. This is the password that will be used when publishing reports from the report designer to the BI server. Don't leave it blank.
• Open a command prompt window and navigate to c:\Pentaho\server\biserver-ce. Type start-pentaho and hit enter. This will start the HSQLDB database the BI server uses internally in a new command prompt window and start the tomcat server bundled with the BI server also in a new command window.
• Wait for the tomcat server to finish starting up. When finished the tomcat command window will display something like INFO: Server startup in 77980 ms
• Open a command prompt window and navigate to c:\Pentaho\server\administration-console. Type start-pac and hit enter. This will start the pentaho administration console.
• Open a browser window and navigate to http://localhost:8099 to access the pentaho administration console. If prompted for login credentials, use “admin” for the username and “password” for the password.
• Open a browser window and navigate to http://localhost:8080/pentaho to access the pentaho user console
• If port 8080 is already in use, for instance by another web server, modify the file C:\Pentaho\server\biserver-ce\tomcat\conf\server.xml. Search for 8080 and replace the value for the HTTP/1.1 connector with another port number that's not in use. Restart the server and include the new port number in the URL to access the user console.
• Click on the login button in the user console and select the sample user Joe (admin) to login. The username and password are automatically filled in the form. This user has a username of “Joe” and a password of “password”.
• If you'll need to access the user console from different machines, edit the file C:\Pentaho\server\biserver-ce\tomcat\webapps\pentaho\WEB-INF\web.xml. Change the base-url parameter, replacing “localhost” with the server's hostname or IP address.
• To start the report designer, open a command prompt window and navigate to C:\Pentaho\design-tools\report-designer. Type report-designer and hit enter.
• To stop the BI server, open a command prompt window and navigate to c:\Pentaho\server\biserver-ce. Type stop-pentaho and hit enter. OR double click on the stop-pentaho.bat file.
• To stop the administration console, double click the file c:\Pentaho\server\administration-console\stop-pentaho.bat file.
• Note that if you use IE8 for the browser, intranet settings may not be enabled for localhost, and some features of the user console will not work properly. To correct this, select the Tools | Internet Options menu. If the main menu [File, Edit etc] isn't displayed on IE, press the alt key to get it to display. Select the security tab, then the Local intranet zone and click on the sites button. Uncheck the Automatically detect intranet network box and click on the Advanced button. Type in http://localhost and click on the Add button.
• To enable emailing of reports, edit the file C:\Pentaho\server\biserver-ce\pentaho-solutions\system\smtp-email\email_config.xml, adding the details of the email server.