What if you could evaluate, deploy and maintain a Data Warehouse (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) solution for up to 90% less than the cost of proprietary software? What if you can find a solution that has been adopted by customers in all industries and is technically sound and scalable? 

You can, with open source Data Warehousing from MySQL and Business Intelligence from Pentaho.

Join this webcast to find out about real world BI/DW deployment strategies that that offer you robust capabilities, yet with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).  

The MySQL and Pentaho solution has been proven in diverse deployments, from small companies to large enterprises. The subscription support model aligns customer and vendor interests, lowering both your costs and project risks. Join this webcast and learn how to be successful in your BI/DW projects. We will show you how MySQL and Pentaho can easily provide a complete …

Yahoo opens up Hadoop distribution. Microsoft and Novell claim customer wins. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

The elephant in the room
Plenty of news emerged form the Hadoop Summit this week, including Cloudera announced support for Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and introduced Sqoop, open source tool for importing databases into Hadoop, while Yahoo! Released! The! Yahoo! Distribution! Of! Hadoop! opening up its Hadoop developments to the wider community. As Savio Rodrigues noted, there has been a surge in the number of contributors for the Hadoop project in the last year.

Best of the rest
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Cloudera lands funding. SourceForge acquires Ohloh. Novell reports Linux growth. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

Cloudera shows signs of progress
GigaOM reported that Cloudera raised $6m Series B funding from Accel and Greylock and is now looking beyond web applications to wider enterprise adoption of Hadoop. Cloudera also announced its first certification program for Hadoop.

Open source goes mainstream in the UK
There have been signs of change recently with regards to open source adoption in the UK, which has traditionally lagged behind the rest of Europe and the US. CBR Magazine provided an analysis of …

Dear Kettle friends,

Will Gorman and Mike D’Amour, Senior Developers at Pentaho, are presenting Pentaho’s Google integration work at the Google I/O Developer Conference. (at the Sandbox area to be specific)   Yesterday, Pentaho announced that much.

Here are a few of the integration points:

• Google maps dashboard (available in the Pentaho BI server you can download)
• A new Google Docs step was created for Pentaho Data Integration Enterprise Edition
• Running (AVI, 30MB) the …

Yes!

Last night, I completed the draft of "Pentaho Solutions", which is a book I'm writing together with my friend and colleague Jos van Dongen for Wiley.

(Actually, the full title is: "Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL")

Here's an overview of the contents, just to give you an idea what we have been doing:

• 
  
• Part I: Getting Started, Prerequisites, Installation and Configuration and Overview
  • 
    
  • Chapter 1: Quick Start: Pentaho PCI Examples
    
  • Chapter 2: Prerequisites
    
  • Chapter 3: Server Installation and Configuration
    
  • Chapter 4: The Pentaho …

Javier Soltero, former CEO of Hyperic, has maintained that the sale of Hyperic to SpringSource was driven by discussion between himself and SpringSource CEO, Rod Johnson, but the fact that the companies shared investors - Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital - no doubt accelerated the deal (and I wonder whether either could have afforded to acquire the other without shared investors).

When examining the open source vendor landscape it is tempting to imagine that the combined total could be bigger than the sum of its parts - that a combination of many open source product specialists could mount a challenge to Red Hat and Sun to claim the title of biggest open source software vendor.

Benchmark and Accel are among …

Dear Kettle fans,

As expected there was a lot of interest in cloud computing at the MySQL conference last week.  It felt really good to be able to pass the Bayon Technologies white paper around to friends, contacts and analysts.  It’s one thing to demonstrate a certain scalability on your blog, it’s another entirely to have a smart man like Nicholas Goodman do the math.

Sorting massive amounts of rows is hard problem to take on.  Making it scale on low-cost EC2 instances is interesting as it …

Dear Kettle & MySQL fans!

I’m really looking forward to go to the MySQL User Conference next week, not just because I’m speaking in 2 sessions again, but perhaps also because these are “interesting” times for MySQL and Sun Microsystems.  Pivotal times it would seem.

Here are the 2 sessions I’m going to do:

• Cloud Computing with MySQL and Kettle : I’m particularly happy that MySQL accepted this session: it will demonstrate how easy it has become to do cloud computing exercises with tools like MySQL and Kettle.

• …

Dear reader,

In a little over 3 weeks, April 2nd and 3rd, we’re organizing a Pentaho Partner Summit at the Quadrus Conference Center in Menlo Park near San Francisco.

If you are (as the invitation describes) an “Executive, luminary, current or prospective partner from around the world” and if you come over you’ll meet myself, Julian Hyde and perhaps a couple of other architects as well.  That is outside of a host of other interesting people like Zack Urlocker (MySQL) and of course Richard Daley our CEO. We’ll be doing a couple of lengthy sessions on Kettle and Mondrian …

I had a customer recently who had very hierarchical data, with some complicated measures that didn’t aggregate up according to regular ole aggregation rules (sum, min, max, avg, count, distinct count). Now, one can do weighted averages using sql expressions in a Measure Expression these rules were complex and they also were dependent on the other dimension attributes. UGGGGH.

Come to that: their analysts had the pristine, blessed data sets calculated at different rollups (already aggregated to Company Regions). Mondrian though, is often too smart for it’s own good. If it has data in cache, and things it can roll up a measure to a higher level (Company Companies can be rolled up to Regions if it’s a SUM for instance) Mondrian will do that. This is desirable in like 99.9% of cases. Unless, you want to “solve” your cube and just tell Mondrian to read the data from your tables.

I started thinking - since …