Every BI installation has power users that just want “data dumps.” They may need the dumps for a variety of reasons:

• You’ve built crappy reports. They can’t get the information they need in *YOUR* reports.
• They need to feed the data into another system. They want to select all customers who bought product X in time period Y to send them a recall notice. Need a dump of email / addresses to send them the notice.
• They are addicted to Excel; they feel like a super hero whizzing through the data making fancy graphs and doing a few of their own ratios/calculations.
• They want to munge the numbers. They will export it to Excel, throw out the data that makes them look bad, and then present it to their boss with shiny positive results.

I had a customer who needed something to “feed the data to another system.” Their original approach was to write a Pentaho Report that formatted …

Ok - this has been stewing for some time now, and I think now is the right time to announce that I am working together with Jos van Dongen from Tholis Consulting to create a book for Wiley with the tentative title "Building Pentaho Solutions".

My personal aim is to make this book the primary point of reference for DBAs and Application Developers that are familiar with Open Source products like MySQL and PostgreSQL but have no prior BI skills, as well as BI professionals that are familiar with closed source BI products like Microsoft BI and Business Objects that want to learn how to get things done with Pentaho.

The book will cover all distinct components and sub-products that make up the …

Hi!

Recently I wrote about how glad I was to see two of my proposals for the upcoming MySQL Conference approved.

I am absolutely thrilled to see my third proposal has been approved as well: "Starring Sakila: data warehousing explained, illustrated and subtitled". I'm very proud to announce that I'm doing this talk together with Matt Casters, chief data integration of Pentaho and creator of the popular ETL/Data Integration suite Kettle (a.k.a Pentaho data integration).

During this 45-minute seminar, Matt and I will take the …

I just read this post on Matt Casters' blog. Here, Matt describes why Element 61's Jan Claes is dead wrong in the way he assesses the maturity of open source ETL tools.

Well, I've just read Jan Claes' article in the "research and insights" area of the Element61 website, and frankly, it is pretty easy to see how unsubstantiated it is. Some may be tempted to classify the article as …

Since the very first time I downloaded the Pentaho suite I’ve been wailing, screaming, shouting, snarking that there absolutely MUST be a way to manage data sources that does not involve XML.

Well… Holy Shit. At just under 3 years it’s here (Pentaho Administration Console from 2.0.M3 build):

This is a most appreciated feature for those getting started with Pentaho! Thank you to the Pentaho Engineers for whipping it up!
PS - It’s not perfect yet, but should be solid by 2.0 GA

After having worked for two years and one quarter of a year with MySQL AB (now Sun), I have decided to resign and pursue another career.

Before I joined MySQL AB I was working as a database consultant and application developer. I knew that joining MySQL would mean giving that up, but I was happy to do so because I really liked the MySQL product. I was also attracted by the company itself, the flexible working hours, working from home, travelling abroad, and, very important, being one of the few companies that is capable creating FOSS software on a commercial basis.

I have had a splendid time at MySQL AB, and later Sun. I met lots of smart people and travelled to a bunch of places I would probably not've had the chance to visit otherwise. I learned a lot about the …

I’m back at my favorite spot at the Orlando airport:

This week has gone bye so fast it’s kinda scary.  I got dragged into one meeting after another design session after another knowledge transfer opportunity for 5 days in a row.  After our long working days, the discussions and talks just continued over dinner and beers.

It was great to meet everyone and as always we had a good time around the office and at the Ale House.  I even managed to stay sober this time around.  Well at least most of the time.

As always, the thing that struck me the most was how fast Pentaho changes.  It’s almost like visiting a different company every time I drop in.  Since I don’t see the day-to-day changes around the office, the difference between the first time I visited (15 people) and now (70+) is striking.  The office space occupied more than doubled for example.

Well, let me tell you, …

I?ve been reading The Bee Keeper (also here in PDF), an explanation of the relationship between professional open source software (POSS) vendors and their communities, written by Pentaho?s CTO James Dixon. It is a very elegant explanation of the development/business model employed by the POSS vendors such as MySQL, Pentaho, JBoss and Alfresco.

James uses the analogy of the Bee Keeper to explain the model. It?s worth reading the paper in its entirety to understand just how appropriate this is but to put it very simply: the vendor is the bee keeper; the community is the bees; the open source project is the honey; and the customer …

I've been working on a very fun and challenging proof of concept / usability project that involves Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle), XUL, SWT, Swing and a very cool, slightly controversial theory: with a lot of work frontloaded, we should be able to port user interfaces to any UI technology, and expect consistent behavior AND look and feel without much, if any, additional code .

The project I'm in the middle of encompasses three different but equally compelling goals:

1. To move Pentaho forward in providing common layers across our core pillars (reporting , analysis, data mining, ETL and dashboards).
2. To provide a proof of concept for the Pentaho XUL Framework, an architecture built to help us support common UIs across all of our applications and tools .
3. To provide a common way of describing and managing the information needed to connect to a database.

So, we began by …