I am going to be the instructor for the Operational Business Intelligence course in April. This particular course digs into the reporting tools, scheduling, processes, design, etc. Basically, everything you need to build a reporting-centric solution using Pentaho.
Operational Business Intelligence - San Francisco, CA
303 Twin Dolphins Drive
Suite 600
Redwood City, CA 94065
USA
Monday, April 23, 2007 - Thursday, April 26, 2007
I’m curious: if you signup for the course having learnt about it here, put in the notes that was the case. I’ll bring a special Pentaho shwag gift to anyone who signs up from this blog readership in the next two weeks!
PS - I know I know. Redwood City isn’t technically SFO but … whatever!
General BI, Open Source, Pentaho
Has anyone ever experienced “Bloggers Block?” You know, where you have plenty of things to write about, but are unable to select a topic and put some metaphorical pen to paper? I’ve been experiencing this since my return from extended holiday.
I arrived back and started work again at Pentaho. There’s been a bunch of developments at Pentaho (more open source features, key customer successes, etc), there’s been some interesting open source moves (licenses, alliances, etc), some interesting BI moves (vertica, hyperion acquisition, etc). Basically, I have a Blog Backlog of probably 25 or so juicy, page plusers. Things I would dig into, opine about, and hopefully help disseminate some useful information.
So… What’s the problem?
I just can’t. I’ve sat down and I look at my blog client and I just can’t seem to pick one, and write it. None of it seems worthy enough to be the first, or most interesting, or … Pick any reason, I’ve come up with it for why not to write on a subject.
Now that I’ve committed the cardinal sin of Apologetic Blogging (I aboslutely HATE reading blog posts entitled: Sorry I haven’t posted in a while) perhaps I should just turn it in. In fact, with so many people blogging these days it’s almost refreshing to hear “I don’t blog anymore.”
So I ask myself the question honestly: Am I done blogging? Is it worth the time? Is it worthwhile? Do I receive enough enjoyment from the writing to continue?
I don’t know. However, implicitly my next (possible) blog will answer that question, yes?
Personal
After a wonderfully refreshing extended holiday to South America, I’m back.
I sit today in front of my laptop, looking out the window at a swarthy, rainy Seattle day. The surprise? I’m kind of excited to get back to work, connect up with all my coworkers/partners/customers, and check out the new Pentaho releases while I was gone (Kettle 2.4.0, yippee).
Just sooooo much to blog about! Best get through that Inbox so I can do some real work tomorrow. 
Personal
Someone once said
If you want to clear your mind go for a long walk. The longer the walk, the clearer the mind.
That’s good advice I say, and some that my wife and I are taking. Not that we need to clear our minds, but it’s our honeymoon of sorts we’ve been planning for almost two years.
We’re headed off for a two month trip to South America (Argentina and Chile). We won’t be checking emails, blogs, phone messages.
Signing off the Matrix for two months. Catch y’all in March!
Personal
David Gilbert, master behind the every popular JFreeChart, has initiated a campaign on behalf of JFree.org for Wateraid.
Bits matter, but people matter too. Consider donating on behalf of a very worthwhile open source project.
http://www.justgiving.com/jfree
Open Source
My jaw nearly hit the ground when I saw one of the badgeware company CEOs actually write, what most badgeware critics already know: they want you to buy a commercial license because you find the forced UI advertising unpallatable.
From Dave Rosenberg (Mulesource) blog on “Licensing in London“:
So, if you use Mule in your software product
and sell it commercially, then you are required to either make a
licensing deal with us or keep the �powered by Mule� logo visible. Just
as so many other things in OSS are confusing, it appears that this too
has created some consternation-primarily because people want to embed
Mule in their products and couldn’t quite make sense of how the
attribution would work.
My answer was simple. You make a deal with us for a commercial license and then you do whatever you want.
WOW.
At least someone is finally admitting this is one of the intents of badgeware. Even if we disagree, it is important to say with genuine sincerity: thank you for being honest about why you use badgeware.
The bright side is at least these vendors are finally getting some pushback and having to explain their licenses. This is important… People need to know what they’re getting themselves into: forced advertising for vendors using a license that is, arguably, NOT an open source license. Badgeware (even **if** the OSI approves it) has implications for customers, developers, partners; in short, EVERYONE. People need to know that this is the kind of company/project/license they are dealing with.
Open Source
Last December Pentaho released it’s first certified, Generally Available product. In the past year there has been an astounding number of features added to the platform. Those who keep up with the open source releases (approximately every 6-8 weeks) have been able to watch the progression piecemeal.
Pentaho announced today the General Availability of Pentaho 1.2 which represents nearly one year of Pentaho (and community) contribution.
The past 3 months Pentaho and the community at large have widdled down Bugs, hiccups, issues, etc with all this new code and arrived at something suitable for production. Pentaho users (customers and community alike) have a set of bits they can feel pretty confident using. I’m proud of this effort, and wish to congratulate all those who submitted (or fixed!) Bugs. One of the things I love about open source: everyone benefits greatly from small acts of contribution.
Happy Holidays and Thank You!
Pentaho
JasperSoft announced today they’ve crossed a milestone for their reporting library acquiring 5000 customers. JasperSoft is the primary sponsor of JasperReports, a popular open source reporting library; it’s one of the three libraries that Pentaho includes in our complete Open Source BI Suite.
Congrats Guys!
Open Source
There was some requests on the Pentaho Data Integration forums for an example of how to generate a simple chart from a CSV file.
Sometimes people get so lost in the technology, that it’s tough to just do something pretty simple. I totally get that. Pentaho still has plenty of room for improvement on the usability, especially for people coming to the platform for the first time.
Well, here tis.
Unzip examplecsv.zip to pentaho-demo/pentaho-solutions/samples/etl/ in the sample server.
Basically, the idea is to turn a csv file (example.csv):
Year,PresentsNickReceived,PresentsRequested
2003,7,4
2004,9,8
2005,8,9
2006,11,8
into this chart
The confusing part, I’m guessing from the thread, was how data gets from KETTLE to PENTAHO.
Not hard at all actually.
Pentaho initiates (ie, calls Kettles API) the Kettle transform and then “slurps” in memory records from a specified step. It’s the UNIX equivalent of the “tee” utility where you’re just watching data arriving at a certain place. In this example, I’ve made it even more explicit by naming the “dummy” step “for_pentaho” so that it’s clear the step that Pentaho is “slurping” the data from.
After that, it’s just a matter of building a chart like any other in the platform.
Data Integration (Kettle), How To
Irony 1:
An organization (OSI) that was formed to promote a commercial friendly form of a concept is NOW being described by some as inflexible and not suitable for “commercial open source.” Well, keeping it real for 7 years ain’t bad!
Irony 2:
The anti-forking license clause (forced UI attribution) may cause a fork in open source. One of these companies has suggested that if OSI supporters don’t “shape up” and approve their licenses another organization will lilkely serve that need better.
Irony 3:
These companies believe some of their “freedom” to write software under a license of their choice is being diminished. They believe it’s out of a philosophical opposition to companies investing in IP and then gaining revenue from that IP. Not so. Open Source has THRIVED alongside other models (proprietary, shared source, etc). YOU ARE WELCOME to license software you create any way you like (shared source, proprietary, etc): that’s FREEDOM! Just don’t be surprised if you claim to be Open Source and you’re NOT that people take notice and call it!
Open Source