How does our metabase integration work?

[Guido1982]

I see we have an integration for metabase, but can't really find how we integrated it. Could someone elaborate on this?

[joebordes]

The current integration is based on ETL to a data warehouse using Pentaho PDI. When I finished that work I thought that it would be better to do it using views and I am waiting for someone to fund that approach. Look for me and we can discuss the pros, cons, and options.

[Guido1982]

Sorry, you have to walk me through some things, just watching a Pentaho video now but this raises a lot of questions about what this actually is. Is it a reporting client that we can connect to the database? And metabase is about the same thing?

[joebordes]

You don't need to learn PDI. I have a better solution.

[Guido1982]

I will look for you in gitter, or we can do a hangout. Just need to understand the terminology, I'm sure when you know that, it can't be too difficult.

[joebordes]

Pentaho is a complete Business Intelligence stack. It will take you from raw data to complete statistics passing through reporting and analysis. Incredible, but mostly useless. There are only a handful of companies out there prepared for this kind of BI.

What I did was use their ETL tool, PDI, to create a data warehouse from a coreBOS database, Once you have the data warehouse you can start reporting and analyzing on it. Instead of using Pentaho tools for that I use metabase, because it is much easier to understand, much more user-friendly. It doesn't do the whole stack like Pentaho does but it does very well what most companies do need.

The thing is that with this approach you still need a separate database for the warehouse and sync information regularly while having some other downsides so I thought of another approach based on views which I would like to try.

HTH

[Guido1982]

Yes, my approach would always be to keep the central CB database and only create views into that database. Building a second dependant DB is a recipe for problems / a lot of work I think.