http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog Musings on reporting, OLAP, ETL, open source Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:17:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There was a question posed the other day on the Pentaho forums about how to get Kettle to process "all the rows" at one step before beginning execution on the others. Sven suggested to use the "execute once for every row" as a solution which I think is probably ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2008/06/25/ordered-rows-in-kettle/ So, it appears as if there was some pent up demand for great looking flash charts. The brief couple of days that my initial post on my rough integration work with Open Flash Charts I've had: - 2 Pentaho Partners ask for the solution so they can start using it - ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2008/06/13/beautiful-flash-charts-part-ii/ Business Intelligence is a complex diverse space. There's a bunch of technologies that typically need to be combined together to get a comprehensive, end to end solution. One of the things that I believe is confusing for users of Pentaho is the sheer volume of clients that are available to ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2008/06/12/pentaho-fat-clients-breaking-into-double-digits/ I've worked on several customer dashboards and found the charting in Pentaho to be pretty good in a lot of circumstances, but lacking for a lot of circumstances. In particular, certain shading, animations, etc aren't supported in Pentaho charts (based on JFreeChart). There are a bunch of Flash charting libraries, ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2008/06/11/beautiful-flash-charts-for-pentaho/ Pentaho announced last week that their BI Platform version 2.x and onward would be released under the GPLv2 license. I'm an outspoken critic of GPL for a lot of use cases, and personally lean toward an Apache/MIT/BSD myself. However, for nearly everyone involved in Pentaho this is a ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2008/06/10/pentaho-goes-gpl-a-non-event/ I needed to uniquely identify a request to Pentaho (one particular action sequence request). Found a pretty darn easy way to do this with the help from Java RMI classes. - Insert a Javascript data source - Enter the following script function getGUID() { var VMID = new Packages.java.rmi.dgc.VMID(); return VMID.toString(); } getGUID(); - Set return type ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2008/05/01/how-to-generate-a-guid-in-an-xaction/ There's been some questions floating through the Pentahoshpere (I think I'm the first person to use that word, btw) about how to use Subreports. I think there's a good description at the wiki that covers the basics, but I don't think there's a good working example that is shipping ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2008/04/17/subreports-example-zip/ 2007 was an off year for me when it comes to blogging. Not a surprise, since my first blog after returning from my trip to Argentina was entitled "Am I done blogging?" Seeing that I'm a self proclaimed "Data Dynamo and BI Geek" and even google agrees (search term "BI ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2007/12/23/2007-was-a-desert-of-blogging/ Zipcar and Flexcar are both car sharing companies. For background on the concept, read about it here. My wife and I share one car for a variety of reasons and it works out really well. We end up walking a bunch more. We take the bus ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2007/10/31/zipcar-buys-flexcar-woo-woo/ For readers who have been perusing since the early days of this blog (bayon blog) you'll know what I'm talking about. If you're a reader that has joined in the past year and half you're probably wondering "What is bayon?" bayon is a boutique consulting firm specializing in Business Intelligence ... http://www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/2007/10/26/bayon-is-back/