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At its core, the Pentaho Agile BI, offers you an integrated solution that allows you and your team to go move seamlessly from ETL to modeling, from data exploration to reporting and data exploration, seamlessly. Competitor solutions require these process steps to occur separately through the use of individual tools and shown below:
Build data warehouse -> Massage the data using ETL tools -> Model the data using modeling tools -> Report and/or analyze data using reporting/analyzing tools
Using Pentaho Agile BI, the process above is integrated into one tool. Leveraging the power of Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), an ETL designer is able to massage data as needed, and, based on input from a business analyst, is able to go directly into visualizing and modeling the data, and finally to providing the data to users for self-serve reporting and analysis purposes. Because the ETL,visualizing, modeling, and reporting tools are integrated, it is easy for ETL designers and business analysts to work iteratively and to make needed changes to the data quickly and effectively. This allows BI projects to run more smoothly and cost effectively. Agile BI also allows the ETL designer to add modeling to his or her skill set thus reducing time allotted for proof-of-concept and prototype iterations. So, the process is more like the one described below:
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