Pentaho has released the first milestone release of Pentaho Metadata(PMD) including the new Metadata Editor(PME)!

Released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), Pentaho's new open source metadata capabilities enable administrators to define a layer of abstraction to shield the common business user from the complexities of underlying databases. Administrators leverage their deep understanding of source systems to convert complex tables, relationships, indexes, and other concepts foreign to a business user, into a user-friendly model reflecting how they think of their business - in terms like customers, products and markets. These "busienss views" can be further enriched by defining security parameters that limit data access to authorized users, default formatting for data fields, column suppression, and additional translations for business views used in multi-lingual deployments.

Pentaho Metadata is built using the Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) standard created by the Object Management Group (OMG) to allow for interoperability with existing metadata stores as well as third-party databases, metadata repositories, and ETL tools. Pentaho's metadata-driven query engine uses JDBC and ANSI standard SQL to allow for the broadest possible choice of proprietary and open source databases including Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL and others.

Download the first milestone release, documentation and source from http://www.pentaho.org/download/latest . Send us your feedback in our Metadata forum at http://forums.pentaho.org/ .

We are pleased to announce new web-based ad hoc query and reporting capabilities for the Pentaho Reporting module of Pentaho's BI suite. The new functionality utilizes an innovative new open source metadata layer that facilitates self-service query and reporting by shielding end users from the complexities of underlying databases and thereby lowering the technical barriers to customized report creation.

Pentaho now provides tailored reporting capabilities for application developers, power users, and business users alike within a common architecture and report format. Read more about it in the press release, or preview the new web-based ad hoc query and reporting tool in a recorded demonstration at http://www.pentaho.com/products/demos/ .

We are happy to release another great solution into the open source business intelligence (BI) arena: Software Quality Reports for JIRA! This is an extension to the Software Quality Reports for Bugzilla solution.

Software Quality Reports for JIRA/Bugzilla (SQR) provides reports and analysis on top of the very popular JIRA and Bugzilla issue tracking systems. Implemented as a “solution” built using the Pentaho BI Suite, it provides an end to end solution for delivering valuable software quality information to product managers, project managers, development managers, and software engineers.

Software Quality Reports includes:

• Extract Transform and Load (ETL) Mappings
• ETL Jobs
• Reporting Data Models (ie, Dimensional Models, staging tables, summary tables, aggregates)
• OLAP Schema Definitions
• Operational Reports
• Analytic Reports

Take a look at SQR for JIRA today at http://sourceforge.net/projects/qareports/ . Post your comments and feedback in the project forums .