What's new in Pentaho 9.2

The Pentaho 9.2 Enterprise Edition delivers a variety of features and enhancements, including access to Microsoft Azure and Cloudera Data Platform, along with the Pentaho Upgrade Installer improvements. Pentaho 9.2 also continues to enhance the Pentaho platform and business analytics experience by introducing new features and improvements.

You can now access Microsoft Azure from Pentaho using the following methods.

• Via VFS connections to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and Blob Storage services. See Connecting to Virtual File Systems for details.
• As PDI and PUC data sources for an Azure SQL database. See Connect to an Azure SQL database for details.
• Load data into an Azure SQL database from Azure Data Lake Storage using the new Bulk load into Azure SQL DB PDI job entry. See Bulk load into Azure SQL DB for details.
• Use PDI's HDI driver and named connection feature to access data on your instance of HDI as you would other Hadoop clusters, like Amazon EMR. See Set up the Pentaho Server to connect to a Hadoop cluster for more information.

You can now access and process data from Cloudera Data Platform in PDI. Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) is an analytics and management platform that provides self-service access to integrated, multi-function analytics on centrally managed business data with security and governance.

You can use PDI's CDP driver and named connection feature to access data on your instance of CDP as you would other Hadoop clusters, like Amazon EMR. See Set up the Pentaho Server to connect to a Hadoop cluster for more information.

You can access and use the installed Apache Hadoop driver for HDFS copy file operations as well as for executing input and output transformations and jobs. The driver works with both secure and unsecured clusters. See Using the Apache Hadoop driver for further instructions.

The new Pentaho Upgrade Installer is an easy-to-use interface tool that automatically applies the new release version to your Pentaho products. You can upgrade version 8.3 of your Pentaho products on a server or a workstation directly to version 9.2 using this simplified upgrade process via the Pentaho Upgrade Installer. See Pentaho upgrade for further instructions.

Pentaho 9.2 includes the following minor platform improvements:

• Performance logging

  Users can take advantage of improvements to how Pentaho logs are configured for auditing and tracking to combine logs from multiple applications for a comprehensive view and analysis of activity across the platform. For more information, see Tracking access to sensitive data using Pentaho logging tools.

• HBase parameter support of namespace and table name files

  HBase steps in PDI now support the use of defaults and variables in namespace and table name file definitions. For more information, see "Options" in the PDI HBase Input step article.

Pentaho 9.2 includes the following minor Business Analytics improvement:

• Analyzer

  Now you can edit the units of measure for Currency or General Number in your analysis report. For more information, see Editing units of measure in a report.