Bowing out... for now

The last 2 days have made me realise how much I need a change in workplace, not necessarily career direction but the 12 hours in 2 days commuting has brought it all home.

So until I get a new job whatever that may be(, to be honest at the moment I'd take a first line support job if it meant I wasn't getting home at 9pm), I will not be on IRC, or moderating the forums as I feel its too much of a distraction from what I really need to be doing which is hitting up recruiters and potential employers. I've spent the last 2 years sorta helping people and now its time I helped my self!

So cheers guys, I'll be back soonish, PAT guys, you can mail me or hit up the dev list, I'll still be working on it in my spare time, as usual ;) , Pentaho guys if you need anything you know where to find me.

See ya in a few weeks(hopefully),

Trout, out.

Lucid looking to the future

Lucid was recently bought from the firesale at LucidEra by Nick Goodman. He's looking to take it forward and with the help of JVS bring new features and a commercial version. For those looking to help out taking LucidDB to the next level check out the mailing list, website and finally they've got around to sorting out an IRC channel ##luciddb on freenode.

Good stuff guys and I'm looking forward to the future.

TTFN
Tom

PAT and Paypal

Just a quick note to all you generous souls out there, we have attached a paypal button to the PAT googlecode page here: http://code.google.com/p/pentahoanalysistool/

If anyone is feeling generous enough to help us maintain our Maven server and the public testing server we use, or just buy us beer... then you know what you can do ;)

A big thank you to anyone who donates!

Cheers

Tom

Google Analytics Traffic

GA now reports our hits 35% above normal which is great stuff, and all this pretty much spawned from the Clear View buy out. I thought I'd show you the chart....

The area I colured in a faint yellow on the right is the are since clear view was announced to the world.... I'm quite impressed ;)

Cheers

Tom

Pentaho Analysis Tool 0.5.0-Snapshot

Due to the fact we had the PAT Community Webex last week, and a stack of twitter and blog space this week, we have zipped up the latest 0.5.0 Snapshot and uploaded it to googlecode.

This isn't supposed to be a stable release just a snapshot of where we are and a good indication of the direction we're headed. We have some basic drilling in there, although the lack of true drilling support is proving problematic. We also have some basic OFC charts(Select the chart panel first before running a query, else you don't see the buttons allowing you to change chart type.) We also have a new dimension browser and other stuff for you to play with and break.

Coming soon we will have a new query builder that will basically allow drag to table, and also we will have a brand spanking new theme to bring us right up to date. Hopefully I will also find some time to crack query model saving and loading so we can soon bring that to you as well. I think once those features and whatever else we can add when we're bored and want a challenge we will look to consolidate, bug fix and ship a fuller release that will bring us closer to 1.0 sometime still targeted for around Christmas.

FOR THOSE WHO TEST IT, IT RUNS ON PORT 9999 SO YOU CAN TEST IT CONNECTING TO THE BI SERVER XML/A. LOGIN IS: ADMIN and PASSWORD: ADMIN

Let us know what you think!

The Differing Opinions Of The Clear View Buy Out

Morning All,

A week or two ago Pentaho announced the purchase of Clear View from Lucidera and its been very interesting to see the range of opinion this has conjured up, which I find interesting because when it was announced that the Dashboard Designer was to be closed source, no one seemed to care, is it the right of every member of the Pentaho community to have enterprise level OLAP Analysis, or just those that cough up the money?

Seth Grimes has an interesting article asking whether Pentaho can really still call itself Commercial Open Source
James Dixon seems far from impressed with this blog post and has posted a retort pointing out that Pentaho already include the closed source Dashboard Designer and still offer far more open source functionality than the rivals.
Merv Adrian would like to point out that Pentaho is now technically 'Open Core'.
and lastly Jos Van Dongen covered the release using words that I don't even know the meaning of(doesn't take much)! ;) But goes on to say that there's nothing really wrong with including it in EE but make sure the community edition doesn't suffer in the process.

What I have noticed over the last week is:

• I have yet to bump into anyone bitterly dissapointed that Clear View is EE only, although maybe thats because there isn't yet a demo available so people haven't seen it?
• I thought it would be a kick in the pants for PAT, far from it, its provided us with plenty of interest with website traffic currently up 28% and many more people enquiring as to when its been ready.
• Helpful suggestions and comments have increased, offers for help testing etc

So what does that say about the community, well I thought that JPivots flaws would see people desperate to buy EE and Clear View but that seems not the case. People seem far more interested in when we'll have a community version of PAT ready to replace JPivot. Now I know I speak for the community and not EE customers, and I have no knowledge of their thoughts and feelings behind Clear View.

My only real concern is that Pentaho will now be less inclined to include PAT within the server when we are stable as it would devalue the Clear View tool. I don't think I'm stepping out of line when I say that, it makes sense. But on the flip side I do think Pentaho need to include more stuff in their EE version because at the moment to companies like mine, support is not a big enough incentive to upgrade.

Anyway we shall see.

Thanks for all the support and we'll have a very unstable 0.5.0 out real soon for you all to break \o/

Cheers

Tom

The Open Source End User Mentality....

I was pondering things this morning when I hit upon the problem, its the mentality of the open source end user.... When I sit in a presentation and ask nicely for end users to throw a bit of time in our direction, do I seriously expect an influx of willing volunteers? No, not really. Why?

Well I am as much to blame as anyone else when it comes to using Open Source software and when finding a bug or problem, actually attempting to fix that bug, if it involves me downloading the bi server source, and debugging in Eclipse, then you can pretty much forget it, I haven't go the time, I tell myself, I have better things to be getting on with, I tell myself, unless its a blocker in which case I may make half an attempt to solve it, then give up and get everyone to vote for it on jira, so why should I expect that mentality to be any different towards PAT? Well, I don't.

Apart from a few translations, Gretchens BI Server plugin and a few other bits and pieces, which I am very grateful for, we haven't had a single bug fix or patch come our way, as I presume everyone sits there and goes... oh, it will be done at some point, then we can start using it.....
And to be honest, I don't blame you ;)

Tom