To whom it may concern, this is a quick note to bring the xmondrian project to your attention. Introduction: Open Source OLAP, Mondrian, Pentaho, and JasperSoftMondrian is the open source OLAP engine. Mondrian provides:

• a multi-dimensional view of a relational database (ROLAP)
• a MDX query engine
• Clever, advanced caching layers to speed up OLAP query performance (making it a MOLAP/ROLAN hybrid i.e., HOLAP)
• Standards compliant OLAP data access by providing XML for Analysis (XML/A) and …

A couple of months ago I wrote about how you can use the MDX functions Ancestors() and Ascendants to retrieve the full lineage of members. (See: "MDX: retrieving the entire hierarchy path with Ancestors()".)

As you might recall, the immediate reason to write about those functions was to find a pure MDX solution to implement the "Show Parents" / "Hide Parents" functionality offered by OLAP cube browsers. To recap, developers of MDX-based pivot tables face a challenge when rendering the result of a query like this:

SELECT    CrossJoin(
            [Product].[Product].Members,
 …

A couple of days ago I wrote about one of my forays into MDX land (Retrieving denormalized tabular results with MDX). The topic of that post was how to write MDX so as to retrieve the kind of flat, tabular results one gets from SQL queries. An essential point of that solution was the MDX Ancestor() function.

I stumbled upon the topic of my previous blogpost while I was researching something else entirely. Creating flat tables and looking up individual ancestors is actually a rather specific application of a much more general solution I found initially. Pivot tables and the "Show Parents" functionalityGUI OLAP tools typically offer a pivot table query interface. They let you drag and drop measures and dimension items, like …

Pivotal launches. SkySQL and Mony Program merge. And much, much more

Our report on the changes in the MySQL ecosystem is now available for 451 clients and non-clients alike at bit.ly/451mysql

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) April 25, 2013

For 451 Research clients: VMware expands Serengeti’s horizons with updated Hadoop virtualization project bit.ly/17muQFI

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) April 26, 2013

For 451 Research clients: SkySQL, Monty Program merge to support MariaDB following formation of MariaDB Foundation bit.ly/10dsdjf

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) …

Inspired by a post from Juice Analytics.

We are a conflicted people. We love our TV and movie violence but worry that it ruins our children’s minds. We want to reduce healthcare costs, but don’t want to restrict the free market.

Conflicts like these leave little room for a satisfactory answer. Basic principles are in conflict and deeply-rooted desires run up against painful consequences. We

Appcelerator raises $15m. Hortonworks launches Data Platform. And more.

# Appcelerator raised $15m in a third round led by Mayfield Fund, Translink Capital and Red Hat.

# Modo Labs closed a $4m investment from Storm Ventures and New Magellan Ventures.

# Hortonworks launched its Hortonworks Data Platform Apache Hadoop distribution, as well as a new partner program. Eric Baldeschwieler put the …

OpenStack Foundation. New Pentaho CEO. And more.

# Rackspace announced its intention to form an independent OpenStack Foundation.

# HP has chosen Ubuntu as the lead host and guest operating system for its Public Cloud.

# Pentaho appointed Quentin Gallivan as its new CEO.

# Hortonworks continued the discussion about contributions to Apache Hadoop.

# Bob Bickel explained why CloudBees is not, itself, open …

Codebits is an annual 3-day conference about software and, well, code. It's organized by SAPO and this year's edition is to be held on November 10 thru 12 at the Pavilhão Atlântico, Sala Tejo in Lisbon, Portugal.

I've never attended SAPO Codebits before, but I heard good things about it from Datacharmer Giuseppe Maxia. The interesting thing about the way this conference is organized is that all proposals are available to the public, which can also vote for the proposals. This year's proposals are looking very interesting already, with high quality proposals from …

Opscode appoints a new CEO. SugarCRM gains a new CFO. And more.

# Opscode named Mitch Hill as CEO, with Jesse Robbins becoming Chief Community Officer.

# SugarCRM claimed billings up 58% in Q2 and appointed a new CFO.

# Tasktop released Tasktop Dev 2.1 and announced Tasktop Sync 1.0.

# Pentaho delivered improved support for Hadoop …

Dear Kettle users,

Most of you usually use a data integration engine to process data in a batch-oriented way.  Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) is typically deployed to run monthly, nightly, hourly workloads.  Sometimes folks run micro-batches of work every minute or so.  However, it’s lesser known that our beloved transformation engine can also be used to stream data indefinitely (never ending) from a source to a target.  This sort of data integration is sometimes referred to as being “streaming“, “real-time“, “near real-time“, “continuous” and so on.  Typical examples of situations where you have a never-ending supply of data that needs to be processed the instance it becomes available are JMS (Java Message Service), RDBMS log sniffing, on-line fraud analyses, web or application …