Pentaho is a complete open source (GPL) Business Intelligence solution offering ETL, reporting (Birt,jFreeReport,Jasper), OLAP, charting and graphing, and advanced features such as Datamining, Bursting, Dashboarding, (Google) Maps integration, Business Rules integration, and Workflow.

For a MySQL database/data warehousing environments, Pentaho is a natural fit. Pentaho ships with MySQL connectors, and there is ample community support for working with Pentaho and MySQL.

During this talk, Pentaho is used in a unorthodox manner. BI applications are normally confined to enterprise board meetings, but during this talk, it will be demonstrated in detail how BI can be designed, deployed, and used by MySQL DBAs to monitor the health of their MySQL Databases.

Using the Workflow, Bursting, and ETL features integrated in Pentaho, diagnostic information is harvested from a farm of MySQL Databases. Custom KPIs showing database performance metrics are presented in Dashboards, allowing for management by exception. Problem database, users, and queries are thus identified, allowing the DBA to drill down to provide enough information to take action.

Finally, it will be shown how to use Workflow to automatically react to problem datababase behavior. This feature can also be used for advanced notification of the DBA by sending an SMS message to a PDA or mobile phone.