Pentaho Musings

Hi Tom! well spoken - thanks for your efforts in...

2009-12-08T21:03:17.322Z

Hi Tom!

well spoken - thanks for your efforts in the community.

I would just like to add that the culture and conduct on the pentaho forums is very similar to that of other forums. For anybody that is new to forums, I can warmly recommnend reading How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.

Roland Bouman

Thanks for the comment Diddy, yeah we're heading q...

2009-12-04T09:02:36.416Z

Thanks for the comment Diddy, yeah we're heading quickly towards the 1.0 finish line, most of the big features are in place, so now its tidying up and bug fixing. Paul is working hard on the PAT - BI Server Plugin also, although until the Pentaho developers fix up their data sources that may be problematic for a while.

Tom

Hi Tom, Thanks a lot for the video! It's best to s...

2009-12-03T10:59:06.634Z

Hi Tom,
Thanks a lot for the video! It's best to see PAT in action. I quite like the chart/pivot table interaction, the export function to Excel and that you can now save your analysis. Excellent work! I am looking forward to seeing version 1.0 ;)
Best regards,
Diddy

thanks for PAT! ) I gonna create a schema, and wan...

2009-11-18T08:45:30.042Z

thanks for PAT! )
I gonna create a schema, and wanna ask if you can give me some assistance plz ?)

Yeah, I would have thought though that the new mod...

2009-11-12T20:52:22.439Z

Yeah, I would have thought though that the new modifications would have been enough for a minor release

Not that I've done this but I know that Pedro uses...

2009-11-12T18:21:34.068Z

Not that I've done this but I know that Pedro uses CBF to pull some bits of 3.5 GA and some other bits of reporting post 3.5 together into a single build.

Tom, I’ve stumbled across your post by accident. H...

2009-11-09T17:03:03.018Z

Tom, I’ve stumbled across your post by accident. Having spent 10+ years of developing on Progress platform I agree with your comments and share your frustration as far as proprietary technologies and lock-in concerned.

ODBC/JDBC is not the way to access Progress DB as it’s quirky and about an order of magnitude (that’s it at least 10 times) slower than queries run in native 4GL. Progress is very particular in the ways things need to be done and any deviation from their textbooks samples is likely to be punished by endless hours trying to invent a workaround in order to move forward just a bit further.

Having said that many banks, insurance and automotive companies use Progress for their core systems. At some point Progress even tried to co-operate with MySQL and push a commercial version Nusphere MySQL (they’ve even setup ww.mysql.com). Progress developed a transactional storage engine for MySQL called Gemini but insisted it’s distributed under commercial licence which didn’t go well with founders of MySQL.

John

Fil, thats cause everyone but me talks shop ;) An...

2009-11-06T05:54:12.871Z

Fil, thats cause everyone but me talks shop ;)

Anyway thanks to all you guys and everyone else who's wished me good luck by other means.

Good luck magicialtrout. #pentaho isn't the same....

2009-11-05T22:54:51.916Z

Good luck magicialtrout. #pentaho isn't the same. It lacks your wit and charm....

Good luck. If I spot any thing I'll let you know. ...

2009-11-02T13:28:03.293Z

Good luck. If I spot any thing I'll let you know. Though if your spending your time hunting rather than on IRC then you'll probably beat us to any thing :)

All the best with the job hunting! Hope you find a...

2009-11-02T09:54:25.117Z

All the best with the job hunting! Hope you find another BI job soon!

Always good to get a break from the day to day rou...

2009-10-31T01:30:48.725Z

Always good to get a break from the day to day routine and cheers on sticking up for your priorities.

Connect up with me on email; I'd love to help however I can.

Tom, We'll be making some announcements soon on w...

2009-10-21T16:49:06.953+01:00

Tom,

We'll be making some announcements soon on what we'll be offering. We plan to add a bunch of new administration / ease of use features to make our great little database easier to use for a wider audience! We love open source, so suffice to say the new features we have planned now the source will be FOSS.

Looking to take LucidDB to a whole new level, and very much looking forward to working with the entire Eigenbase team and LucidDB community!!

w00t... I like the sound of that epic ness

2009-10-13T21:14:28.765+01:00

w00t... I like the sound of that epic ness

If someone would help me build a virtual machine u...

2009-10-13T04:06:53.107+01:00

If someone would help me build a virtual machine using Ubuntu that contains a complete and correctly configured build environment complete with server and examples that illustrate PAT, I will release it and maintain it as new versions come out. This would eliminate the whole hassle of setting up the environment just to work with 10% of what really interests people and encourage a lot of build efforts.

Eliminate the PITA problems and I think people will come tinker around plenty. It can be built with completely free and opensource software and OS, there's no excuse.

Call the thing "Pentaho BI Suite Community Development Edition".

Make it stupid easy to build things. Let me tinker with a few lines of code and then try to build and try it out.

I can't write Java. But i can make a cracking pot ...

2009-10-12T12:22:44.103+01:00

I can't write Java. But i can make a cracking pot of tea!

Same things happen with bigger projects Tom. Power...

2009-10-10T05:06:22.563+01:00

Same things happen with bigger projects Tom. Power*Architect has over a thousand downloads a week, many users using it in government institutions and big business, yet we have a lot less actual contributors than we would expect.

To be fair, one must understand that PAT is built ...

2009-10-10T04:57:31.665+01:00

To be fair, one must understand that PAT is built on olap4j's Query Model, which is a simple but limited API for creating queries.

With PAT, we first thought about using the full MDX parser / object model but decided to start simple and use the Query Model. Olap4j does support any MDX query whatsoever. It can parse any MDX query you fancy and turn it into a very powerful object model in fact.

Olap4j's Query Model prototype has indeed went to a halt in terms of developments lately. Both PAT and Wabit have suffered from that. I myself am very busy on the Wabit Enterprise Server and since we stopped extending the client functionality, the Query Model developments have stalled along with it.

It is worth mentioning though that olap4j's core API now supports write back. The concept of Scenarios, which are basically simulations that you can load/save over many olap4j compatible OLAP servers. This includes Microsoft SQL Server, Mondrian, and soon Palo and maybe SAP BW. This is wonderful in itself.

All that we need to do now is try to tackle the obvious next challenge. Create GUIs over the MDX object model.

Luc Boudreau
Contributor on PAT, Wabit and olap4j =)

Fair point nick, that is very true, even I've trie...

2009-10-09T19:35:44.153+01:00

Fair point nick, that is very true, even I've tried to write PDI plugins before...

well, the other piece of the puzzle is as you ment...

2009-10-09T18:46:11.673+01:00

well, the other piece of the puzzle is as you mentioned, the complexity of the build process.

For instance, I think PDI gets a bunch of people contributing small things here and there (steps, minor patches, icons, bug squashing). I'm one of those "everyone once in a while" contributors. Why? Because Matt has made it easy to contribute casually. Download into Eclipse, Set to AutoBuild, Run Spoon class.

Pentaho on the other hand is pretty difficult to even think about doing incremental development. Their build process might work great for them (I think it does, actually!) but it doesn't surprise me in the least that people who might be willing to put 2 or 3 days in to "scratch their Pentaho itch" don't. Why spend 2 days building a Pentaho dev environment to write a plugin that may be a day or so of work?

Thanks for the presentation! It was very interesti...

2009-10-09T11:49:00.186+01:00

Thanks for the presentation! It was very interesting to hear more details about this project!
At the end of the presentation there was a question about conditional formating. As he mentioned the formating info is written directly into the MDX query like this:
WITH
MEMBER [Measures].[Prior Period Distinct Logins] AS
(
[Login Time Weekly].CurrentMember.PrevMember,
[Measures].[Distinct Users]
)
MEMBER [Measures].[Change in Distinct Logins] AS
(
[Measures].[Distinct Users] - [Measures].[Prior Period Distinct Logins]
)
MEMBER [Measures].[Percent Change] AS
(
([Measures].[Change in Distinct Logins]) /
([Measures].[Prior Period Distinct Logins])
)

, FORMAT_STRING = Iif(
([Measures].[Percent Change] < 0),
"|#.00%|style='red'|arrow='down'",
"|#.00%|style='green'|arrow='up'"
)
SELECT
NON EMPTY {

LastPeriods(
6,
[Login Time Weekly].[2009].[40]
)

}
ON COLUMNS,
NON EMPTY Union (
Crossjoin (
{[Login Channel].[All Login Channels]},
{[Measures].[Distinct Users],
[Measures].[Percent Change]
}
),
Crossjoin (
{[Login Channel].[All Login Channels].Children},
{[Measures].[Distinct Users]
}
)
)
ON ROWS
from [Logins]]
Probably you already know anyways :)

Oh yeah, maybe my post came across wrong, it wasn'...

2009-10-09T10:04:38.294+01:00

Oh yeah, maybe my post came across wrong, it wasn't a swipe at people or the lack of other people volunteering, and wasn't really aimed at PAT it was just a good example of things I have noticed over the last few years about my mentality and the problems you real developers face when starting and open source project. As Doug pointed out on the IRC channel a while ago about the number of actual community based Patchers and Bug fixers you actually had when compared to 'end users'

Well, it's just code now isn't it? It will get be...

2009-10-09T09:47:03.218+01:00

Well, it's just code now isn't it? It will get better once you have a usable product. And code only goes so far anyway. Good ideas, input and direction are at least as important.

Thanks for mentioning me Tom! ;-) At least I tried...

2009-10-08T17:48:18.561+01:00

Thanks for mentioning me Tom! ;-) At least I tried to swing by but I ended up watching the recording.
I have been watching PAT since it's first public release and you are doing a great job. It's interesting to see that PAT is having the same limitations as Wabit when it comes to saving MDX etc because of OLAP4J.
By the way I'm actually not a developer so my influence in SQL Power products is minor. All I can do is telling the developers during the lunch break "Why does PAT already has an enhanced dimension filter and Wabit doesn't?"

yay!!!

2009-10-05T14:17:37.340+01:00

yay!!!