Pentaho® Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL®

Chapter 17. Building Dashboards

In the context of Business Intelligence, a dashboard is an application that is used to present high-level BI content to the end users. Dashboards contain only a few key indicators of the performance of some business aspect ("Sales") or even the business as a whole.

Dashboard content is almost invariably graphical in nature: instead of figures, metrics are symbolized with pictures, meters, dials, and sometimes graphs. The purpose is to provide a very condensed overview of a large area of business, allowing managers to assess business status at a glance.

Typically, the high-level graphical indicators that appear on dashboards provide some interactivity that allows the user to drill down to more detailed business intelligence content such as reports or OLAP cubes.

The Community Dashboard Framework

The Community Dashboard Framework (CDF) is a set of open source technologies that allows BI developers to build dynamic dashboards for the Pentaho BI Server. CDF dashboards are essentially web pages that use AJAX technology to dynamically combine BI components such as reports, charts, OLAP tables, and maps. Although the CDF is by default included in the Pentaho BI Server, it is developed and maintained by members from the Pentaho Community rather than the Pentaho Company.

CDF, the Community, and the Pentaho Corporation

The CDF is a great example of synergy between the goals of a commercial open source software company like Pentaho and its community.

The Pentaho Corporation ...