Thomas and the Classic Reporting Engine team have set a new record for number of release candidates with eleven. The 0.8.9 GA is now ready and has been posted to SourceForge. Over 120 JIRA cases were worked and closed during the final 3 months of the 0.8.9 dev cycle. New features include native sub reports, native support for SQL, Hibernate and Java-data-sources, Field-based formula expressions, Field-based style expressions, native padding, borders and backgrounds, generally improved layouting capabilities and page-able HTML output.

Mondrian started the summer at version 2.3.2 and is now at version 2.4.2. Julian and the Mondrian contributers added Aggregate distinct-count measures, support for the GROUPING SETS SQL construct, several new MDX functions and support for Apache Virtual File System (VFS) URLs. They also knocked out a couple dozen bugs. Julian has been quite busy with olap4j - more on that later.

The 1.6 release of the platform was our biggest development effort since 1.0. Products updated in 1.6 are BI Server, Report Designer (First GA), Report Design Wizard, Pentaho Metadata Editor (New) and Design Studio. We moved many features from the old "Professional" version into open source including Acegi based security, RDBMS Solution Repository and Subscriptions. We implemented a metadata layer that is integrated throughout the platform and design tools making Adhoc Reporting possible. During this time we got tremendous support from the community with feedback, bug reports and testing. The 1.6 testing forum had over 300 posts which greatly shortened the report/fix/test cycle. Over 700 JIRA cases were were closed during this time period for the platform projects.

Now that all that code is out of the way, it's time to celebrate, evaluate the lessons learned and plan for 2008.

Thanks for making the Pentaho open source project successful,

Doug "Spanky" Moran
CommunityConnection@pentaho.org

Below is a copy of the questions to answer. Please email your response to bit@gartner.com

Click here to open a new email message with the survey questions filled out and ready to answer. Or, if you prefer, copy and paste the following questions into your favorite email client.

1. In which data integration scenario are you using the tool? ETL, replication, synchronization, federation, application integration, migration, etc.
2. For how long have you been using the tool in production?
3. How many data sources do you connect to?
4. What types of data sources are you connecting to? e.g. RDBMS, flat files, XML, non-relational DBMS, mainframe, etc
5. Do you connect to packaged applications, such as SAP, Oracle, Infor, Lawson, etc???
6. What latency requirements is the tool fulfilling? E.g. daily batch, intra-day batch, hourly, near-real-time (minutes), real-time (streaming)
7. What data volumes, number of transactions or records, does the tool handle per day, per hour?
8. Do you consider the usage of the tool "mission-critical" for your organization?
9. How many developers are using the tool?

Ingo Klose has created a framework for making the deployment of Pentaho Dashboards to the platform much easier. Check out his article. You can learn more about Ingo in the "Meet the Team" section of this newsletter.

Pedro Alves submitted a tech tip with an alternate way to setup a development environment for Pentaho. His tech tip is here.

Ashish Sarin has posted a tech tip describing an alternative way to integrate Pentaho reports with portlets. Click here.

Nicola Benaglia checked in the first Italian translation for Kettle. - Grazie mille!

Many other people have contributed to the Pentaho projects. If you feel that you should have been recognized, please contact me at CommunityConnection@pentaho.org and I'll take care of it.

To give you an idea what olap4j is about, here is some example code:

// Register driver.
Class.forName("mondrian.olap4j.MondrianOlap4jDriver");
    
// Create connection.
Connection connection =
 DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mondrian:embedded");
OlapConnection olapConnection = 
 connnection.unwrap(OlapConnection.class);
    
// Execute a statement.
OlapStatement statement = olapConnection.createStatement();
CellSet result = statement.executeOlapQuery(
   "select {[Measures].[Unit Sales]} on columns,\n" +
   " CrossJoin([Store].Children, [Gender].Members) " +
   "on rows\nfrom [Sales]");

If this code looks a bit like JDBC, that's not surprising. olap4j is intended to be as portable and easy to use as JDBC. olap4j is in fact an extension to JDBC, and shares core JDBC concepts like connections, statements and metadata. There are plenty of OLAP-specific features in olap4j, like an MDX parser and a query model, but these features are designed to work the same whichever OLAP server you are connected to.

The first draft of the olap4j specification was released last year and the beta version of the spec is expected in December and the first release candidate, olap4j-0.9.1, is available for download now. Work has started on olap4j drivers for both Mondrian and XML/A. The next version of Mondrian, is slated to include an olap4j driver for Mondrian. Further down the road, olap4j is likely become Mondrian's main API.

The olap4j team are working with developers to convert existing OLAP clients and build the next generation of open-source OLAP tools. If you're an OLAP developer, or an expert in JDBC or other database connectivity, get involved: the olap4j team are looking for specification writers, reviewers, driver developers and testers.

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!

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Austin, TX : January 14 - 17
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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.

Where do you live?

Düsseldorf, Germany

What company do you work for and what do you do?

I work for SHS VIVEON AG, one of Pentaho's Partner companies, as a BI/DWH Consultant.

SHS VIVEON AG is a software and consulting company active throughout Europe. Our business activities focus on the central issues of customer management. BI and DWH are two of our consulting core competencies.

OLAP and web based reporting systems are my specialty, although I work in all other DWH related areas, such as database design, ETL processes etc., too. I mainly use my programming skills to customize or enhance the BI systems that I work with.

At the moment I am assigned to a project where we have implemented a complete DWH / BI infrastructure based on MySQL and Pentaho. I am also actively involved in building our Open Source BI business.

Tell us about your career/education

I studied MIS (Management Information Systems) at the University of Bamberg in Germany and also have a Master of Science in MIS/AIS from the Oklahoma State University, USA.

During my studies I started working on BI related subjects and interned at MicroStrategy and Bearingpoint. After my studies I worked for two and a half years as a BI Developer at METRO Information Technology, the IT service provider of one of the world largest retailing companies. About two years ago I was hired at SHS VIVEON as a BI/DWH Consultant.

When did you first become interested in open source?

First my only interest in open source was restricted to using Firefox. ;-) But when I started at SHS VIVEON in late 2005, I had to pick a research subject. At this point I first heard about open source BI projects. My boss agreed that would be an interesting topic with lots of potential and so I started researching the subject. Soon I started working with the Pentaho BI Platform and got involved in the community.

What projects do you work on at Pentaho?

First, I did some testing and tried to report every bug that I found and fixed some small ones myself. Then, when we started to use Pentaho in a client project, I contributed some source code, mainly to enhance the charting engine and started to answer questions in the forum, as and when I'm able to help.

Currently I work on dashboards, have written a Tech Tip and hope to contribute to the Dashboard Designer Incubation project.

Do you work with any projects other than Pentaho?

No.

What do you do in your spare time?

I like to read a good book when I have the time, mainly fantasy and historical fiction. The rest of the spare time my wife and I go to the movies or hang out with friends. We also like to travel, Budapest being our next destination.