What is Pentaho Reporting

Pentaho Reporting is a suite of tools for creating pixel perfect reports. With Pentaho Reporting you are able to transform data into meaningful information tailored to your audience. You can create HTML, Excel, PDF, Text or printed reports. If you are a developer, you can also produce CSV and XML reports to feed other systems.

Pentaho Reporting's development is driven by the goal to create a flexible yet simple to use reporting engine. Using the reporting engine gives you unmatched flexibility to create reports that adapt to your data as almost every property can be computed during report generation. Your reports can include data from virtually any data-source due to Pentaho Reporting's large selection of data-sources, including SQL-databases, OLAP data sources and even the Pentaho Data-Integration ETL tool.

With high performance at low memory consumption the report processing can scale from small footprint embedded scenarios to large-scale enterprise reporting scenarios. Pentaho Reporting integrates perfectly with the Pentaho BI-Server to share your reports with your co-workers and peers.

Pentaho Report Designer

The Pentaho Report Designer is the primary design tool to create report definitions. Its state of the art user interface allows you to spell out your data flow in the report and to define the visual appearance of your report. With the Pentaho Report Designer you are able to create pixel perfect reports quick and efficiently.

The Pentaho Report Designer offers complete access to all settings and configuration options of the Pentaho Reporting Engine. Its high number of possibilities and extreme flexibility can make it overwhelming to novice users. The Pentaho Report Designer is aimed at technically skilled power users.

You can use the Pentaho Report Designer as a Desktop Reporting Tool by running your reports locally. The Pentaho Report Designer can also publish your finished Reports to a Pentaho BI-Server so that your report is available to others.

Pentaho Reporting Engine

The Pentaho Reporting Engine is the underlying technology that creates the reports from your report definitions. The Pentaho Reporting Engine is used both in the Pentaho Report Designer and the Pentaho BI-Platform to drive the report generation.

If you require reporting or printing capabilities in your own application, you can easily embed the reporting engine there.

Pentaho BI-Server

The Pentaho BI-Server is a web-application for sharing and managing reports. With the BI-Platform you are able to make report available to a wider audience. You can automatically send reports by E-Mail to a list of recipients via a process called "bursting". You can schedule large reports to run at night-time so that you get up-to-date information in the morning.