During that start up period, Gretchen has been our community leader.  She defined, and in many cases, implemented the infrastructure we have in place today. This year, Gretchen has been eager to get back to development and is moving into engineering.  Although you will still see Gretchen helping people in the forums, I will be assuming the community leadership responsibilities.  I’m Doug Moran, one of the founders of Pentaho and one of the architects of the platform.  My role is to continue planning and implementing the technologies and processes needed to make the Pentaho community members successful.

In the past year, we moved source code control to Subversion, opened up the JIRA bug tracking system for read access and started moving all documentation into a wiki.  We also combined the separate project forums into a unified forum with better performance and features.

There is more that we want to do to support the Pentaho community. At the top of the list are improving communication, transparency and facilitating contributions.  Here are a few of the infrastructure changes planned for this year:

• Make the community web site more project focused and easier for contributors to find the resources they need.
• Full integration of JIRA, our bug tracking system, with the web site.
• Increase our use of wiki for product documentation, process communication and collaboration.
• More detailed road maps published earlier and with improved reporting of project status.
• Redefine and streamline the contribution process.
• Help create a Pentaho community advisory board.

There is a new forum, Community Discussions at forums.pentaho.org where discussions about community needs take place.  Please post any comments, concerns or ideas regarding the Community at Pentaho. 

Thanks for making the Pentaho open source project successful,

Doug "Spanky" Moran

What does this mean? 

In short, it means more features in open source!  Pentaho offers customer subscriptions for all of our modules that include technical support, indemnification, certified builds and a few additional product capabilities. Companies like DivX, MySQL, Terra Industries and many others have a subscription-support relationship with Pentaho.

In the past, there was some emphasis on adding functionality in what we called “pro features.” A subscription is really about giving customers the confidence and support to deploy mission-critical systems based on Pentaho applications.

Consequently, it made sense to move some of these pro features and their infrastructure code open source under the same MPL license as the platform. The major features that were moved are:

• Web based adhoc reporting
• ACEGI Security
• RDBMS solution repository
• Subscriptions

Currently these features are available as source code but will be available in the next milestone build, approximately March 16th. As always, your feedback is important, let us know by posting to the Platform forum or email communityconnection@pentaho.org.

Highlights

• Cache flushing.
• More efficient evaluation of queries, which return large results. Some MDX functions return their results as iterators in addition to the usual list format.
• Additional exception handling for long running queries and queries that return large result sets.
• JDK 1.5 is now the primary development and delivery platform. You can continue to run Mondrian on JDK 1.4 using the provided backwards-compatibility JARs created by Retroweaver.
• Added support for Ingres and LucidDB

• Apache VFS support
• Advanced error handling: JS, Table Output and Update steps
• Limit size of logs in Spoon to max 5000 lines (configurable)
• Create File, Delete File and Wait for file - Thanks Sven
• SFT Put: put file on remote FTP server - Thanks Joerg Kurzend
• BulkLoad into MySQL - Thanks Samatar Hassan
• WSDL lookup, first core implementation
• Lots of i18n fixes and documentation updates in several languages.

• Many usability improvements suggested in the forums and training sessions.
• Improved Report Design Wizard integration
• Improved Query Designer integration
• Better JNDI and JDBC driver handling including automatic driver "discovery" 
• Many bug fixes

• Remote Job Execution
• Improve Filing of Bug Reports
• WSDL Plugin: cleanup, improvements
• PALO code integration
• Mirroring Partitioning Method
• Scheduler Integration