Glossary of Terms

Attribute

A property or field of an object in the directory.

Authority, role, or group

In the BI Server, these three terms are synonymous. A role is a string that is associated with a user. A role is said to be granted to a user. A user is said to belong to or be a member of a role. The same role can be granted to multiple users and users can be granted zero or more roles. The BI Server uses roles to make authorization decisions.

BI Server

The BI Server consists of the Pentaho BI Platform and the libraries that deliver end user BI capabilities. The server runs inside a J2EE-compliant Application Server such as Apache, JBOSS AS, IBM WebSphere, WebLogic, and Oracle AS.  The BI Server referred to in this document is your customized PCI. See also, #Pre-Configured Installation (PCI).

End user capabilities

In the Pentaho Open BI Suite, end user capabilities include reporting, analysis, workflow, dashboards, and data mining.

LDAP User DN (Distinguished Name)

Used with LDAP authentication, this name consists of one or more strings identifying the user's assigned attributes in the LDAP Backend server and a user password.

Manager

A user with read access to relevant objects in the directory. If you're familiar with the JDBC API, a manager is analogous to a user name given along with a URL and password in a DriverManager.getConnection (url, user, password) call.

Pentaho BI Platform

The BI Platform is the core architecture and foundation of the Pentaho Open BI Suite. The BI Platform is composed of the libraries and compiled code that provide execution framework and services associated with logging, auditing, security, scheduling, ETL, Web Services, attribute repository, and rules engine. See also, #BI Server.

Pentaho Design Studio

The Pentaho Design Studio is a desktop Eclipse-based design environment that allows solutions, reports, queries, business rules, dashboards, and workflows to be viewed and edited graphically. The Pentaho Design Studio is a Java application that is installed on the system administrator's desktop.

Pentaho Open BI Suite

A process-centric, solution-oriented platform that includes BI components, which enable companies to develop complete solutions to BI-related issues.

Pre-Configured Installation (PCI) 

The PCI is a ready-to-use pre-configured sample deployment that can be customized quickly and easily. The PCI deployment includes the following components: JBoss Application Server, JBoss Portal V2.0, sample JSPs that demonstrate platform component usage, sample data, sample reports and BI processes, users and roles used in samples. The PCI can be modified to work with MySQL, Postgres or Oracle for the RDBMS repository.

Provider URL

A URL usually specifying protocol (such as ldap:// or ldaps://), host name, port, and root DN. If you are familiar with the JDBC API, a provider URL is analogous to a URL given along with a user name and password in a DriverManager.getConnection (url, user, password) call.

Root DN

The distinguished name of an object to which all search bases are relative.

Search base

An LDAP directory is hierarchical. Objects in the directory can have children and those children can have children, and so on. To search for relevant sub trees in the directory, a search base is necessary. The base indicates the DN of an object from which to start searching. Search bases are relative to the root DN. Stated differently: A search base is appended to the root DN to form a search base DN.

Search filter

A search filter is an expression that adheres to the rules specified in RFC 2254. It is always enclosed in parentheses.

Server repositories

The BI Server includes three embedded repositories that store the data necessary to define, execute, and audit a solution. These include: a solution Repository, a runtime repository, and an Audit Repository. The solution repository contains the metadata that defines solutions. The runtime repository contains items of work managed by the workflow engine. The audit repository contains tracking and auditing information.

Solution Engine

The BI Server contains the engines and components for reporting, analysis, business rules, email, desktop notifications, and workflow. These components are integrated together so that they can used to solve a BI-related problem.  In a solution, the behavior, inter-operation, and user interaction of each subsystem is defined by a collection of solution definition documents. These documents are XML-based and contain the definitions of business processes, definitions that execute as part of processes on-demand, or called by Web services. These activities include definitions for data sources, queries, report templates, delivery and notification rules, business rules, dashboards, analytic views.