This month there are two surveys that we would like the community to participate in, The BI Survey and Aberdeen Research's Survey on information needs and skill-sets.

The BI Survey (formerly The OLAP Survey) is a great example of how far open source BI products like Mondrian have come in the enterprise. Last year, even though Mondrian was not included in the survey, there were enough write in votes that it was included in the final report. It ranked better than established proprietary BI tools like: Hyperion Planning, Information Builders WebFOCUS and Business Objects Cartesis. This year, thanks to community support, Pentaho/Mondrian has been added as a specific technology choice in the survey.

Thanks for making the Pentaho open source project successful,

Doug "Spanky" Moran
CommunityConnection@pentaho.org

The BI Survey is strictly independent. While Pentaho and other vendors assist by inviting users to participate in the Survey, the vendors do not sponsor the survey, nor influence the questionnaire design or survey results.

As a participant, you will not only have the opportunity to ensure your experiences are included in the analyses, but you will also receive a summary of the results from the full survey. You will also have a chance of winning one of ten $50 Amazon vouchers.

English version of the survey

German version of the survey

The study findings will uncover the top pressures organizations are facing and will reveal the current and planned strategies, tactics and technologies/services investments that best-in-class respondents are using and seeking to assist them in delivering actionable information to the enterprise.

To thank people for taking the time (about 10-12 minutes) to complete this survey, Pentaho is also identified specifically in the survey section relative to current or planned technology usage. Aberdeen will provide them with a complimentary copy of the final report ($399 value). As always, Aberdeen keeps all survey respondents' information strictly confidential.

http://www.aberdeen.com/survey/BI%2DITSkillSets/

Milestone stable build of Platform featuring major stability and usability improvements in metadata and web adhoc reporting. 67 issues resolved since Milestone 4. New features include:

• WAQR reports are template based
• Mondrian cache flushing from server
• Upgrade to JFreeReportEngine 0.8.9
• Upgrade to Kettle 2.5
• Major chart enhancements

Download Pentaho BI Server 1.5.5 M5

Design Studio 1.5.5 M5 released July 10th

Milestone stable build of Design Studio. 24 issues resolved since Milestone 4. New features include:

• Integrated MQL editor
• Separate plug-ins for Action Sequence Editor and Report design Wizard
• Packaged with Eclipse 3.2
• Package Mac OS-X and Linux stand alone clients

Download Design Studio 1.5.5 M5

Pentaho Report Designer 1.5.5 M5 released July 10th

This release contains bug fixes. For more information, please read the Change Log for version 1.5.5

Pentaho Metadata Editor 1.5.5 M5 released July 10th

This release contains bug fixes and enhancements. For more information, please read the Change Log for version 1.5.5

BI Platform 1.5 Release Candidate 1 - Scheduled August 3

Mondrian 2.3 - Early August

Pentaho Training sessions offer the fastest route to becoming a "solution-ready" developer with the Pentaho Open BI Suite.

Sign up now and get a 20% discount!

Building Analytic Solutions
London, UK : July 23 - 26
Washington, DC : August 20 - 23
Toronto, Canada : Sept 10 - 13
Seattle, WA : September 17 - 20

See entire training schedule

Not sure where to find all the tools you need to be a committer in the Pentaho projects?
Here's an on-ramp to contributing to the projects, the location of the core tools of a successful Pentaho developer:

• Community Home
• Downloads
• Get the Source Code
• The Forums
• Issue Tracking with JIRA
• Documentation Wiki
• Tech Tips

Where do you start? Email communityconnection@pentaho.org.

Tell us a little about your engineering career to date.

I started programming in the early days of computers, with a Commodore 64 as my primary tool. Later, when 64 kilobytes of memory were not enough for the games I wanted to write, I entered the realm of PC.

After a formal apprenticeship as programmer, I worked some time as RPG/400 programmer. Just by accident I encountered Java and decided that I loved it. Forced to choose between a safe job with RPG and the AS/400 and a insecure life with Java, I headed for insecurity and became a self-employed consultant and Java-Trainer in 2001.

Shortly after that, I started to study for a Bachelor's degree in computer science in addition to the consultancy. But as I more and more got sucked into the Pentaho universe, I have decided to suspend University as soon as the current semester ends.

When did you first become interested in open source?

As nearly everyone, my first contact with open source was through Linux. But as Linux was written in C and I had (and still have) a strong, but non-printable opinion on that language. It didn't touch me as a programmer.

For the programming side, Tomcat and the iSeries-Toolkit were the first Open-Source projects I used for development. Shortly after that, I joined tinySQL and JFreeReport development. Since then I'm addicted to JFreeReport.

What projects do you work on at Pentaho?

I'm the Pentaho Reporting Bug-Planter. In that function I refine the bugs of the Pentaho Reporting projects, I remove the obvious ones and create new living space for new bugs by adding new features to the engines.

Do you work with any projects other than Pentaho?

Pentaho is a life-time task. Once we fully conquered the market and converted the closed source BI vendors into fellow open source citizens, I will return to writing games (Open-Source this time).

What do you do in your spare time?

If I'm not reading books, I'm on my way, hunting old new books from any second-hand bookstore I can find (as they have a more interesting selection of non-mainstream books). I'm constantly on the search for good books about politics, history, social science and anything else that sounds interesting. The only topic I avoid is pure mathematics, I'm allergic to that.

When the weather is good and there's plenty of time, I also love to roam the woods and mountains around my home (just joined by a good book, a man's best friend).