http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog Musings on reporting, OLAP, ETL, open source Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:30:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've wanted to fly since I was 14.  I started training in 2004, but cut it short when I moved from Boston to Seattle.  The wife was kind enough to give me a swift kick in the butt telling me to go get the license now; doing so later in ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2009/06/05/off-topic-my-first-airplane-solo/ Pedro Alves, the very talented lead developer behind the Pentaho Community Dashboard Framework gave me a good chuckle with his high opinion of MDX as a language: MDX is God's gift to business language; When God created Adam and Eve he just spoke [Humanity].[All Members].Children . That's how powerful MDX is. ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2009/04/21/mdx-humor-from-portugal/ I've worked with several customers over the past year helping them scale out their data processing using Pentaho Data Integration. These customers have some big challenges - one customer was expecting 1 billion rows / day to be processed on their ETL environment. Some of these customers were ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2009/04/21/pdi-scale-out-whitepaper/ I'll be roaming in Manhattan this Thursday and Friday. Have some plans, but actually have some bits of time. Anyone want to shoot the breeze about Pentaho / BI / Open Source? Email me: ngoodman@ignorethispart.com bayontechnologies.com http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2009/04/07/nyc-49-and-410/ I'm at the Westin close to the event space for the summit... I'm around tonight - meeting Bryan Senseman from OpenBI a bit later (730 or 800pm).  Anyone else around and want to meet up for dinner?  Email me ngoodman@ignorethispart.com bayontechnologies.com. http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2009/04/01/pentaho-partner-summit/ 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 ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2009/02/18/make-mondrian-dumb/ 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 ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2009/02/09/self-service-data-export-using-pentaho/ UPDATE: This step is available in Kettle 3.2 M1. For those that have done more involved Kettle projects you'll know how valuable the Javascript step is. It's the Swiss Army knife of Kettle development. The calculator step is a nice thought, but the limited set of functions and the ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2009/01/30/the-death-of-prevrow-rowclone/ SQL is great. There are millions of people who know it, it's semantics are standardized (well, as much as anything is ever I suppose), and it's a great language for interacting with data. The folks at SQLstream have taken a core piece of the technology world, and turbocharged ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2009/01/27/select-stream-real_time_bi_metric-from-data_in_flight/ PentahoFlashChart is a component built for Pentaho 2.0.stable (or Enterprise Edition) that allows you to render flash charts in the User Console and Dashboards. It uses the flash library "Open Flash Chart 2.0" which is an LGPL licensed SWF. The charts are NOT available for rendering in Pentaho ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2009/01/08/pentahoflashchart-basics-2/