Pentaho Community Data Access (CDA)

Pedro Alves did some impressive work on the new CDA (Community Data Access):

CDA allows you to access any of the various Pentaho data sources without worrying about the details. It can be used as a standalone plugin on the Pentaho BI server that can output the result in several formats or it can be used in combination with the Dashboard Editor and the CDF.

It basically covers any source that you can use within PRD (Pentaho Report Designer). Additionally it has a security layer that prevents code injection.

Moreover it has a caching layer (only Mondrian provides caching out of the box).

CDA also offers unions, joins (full outer join), column selection, formula additon and column renaming. Following output formats are available: JSON, XML, CSV and XSL.

CDA uses XML files to define the access data, which can be created/edited in the CDA Editor (The Editor doesn't work in IE). Results can be previewed via the CDA Previewer.

A CDA file consists two parts: the connection details and the query itself.

By using JNDI you can use the connections that you set up on the Pentaho Admin Panel.

CDA can be used then as input for the Dashboard Editor.

For all charts that are displayed within the CDA plugin pages, CDF is actually called to generate them.

Pedro is working on releasing a new version on CDF with CDA completely integrated.

Watch the webcast on for more details.

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Review coming for "Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration: Beginner's Guide"

I am quite excited to let you know that Packt will kindly send me a copy of their new book "Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration: Beginner's Guide" (by María Carina Roldán) to review it. I should have it in my post box in the next few days and then I'll focus on it. So stay tuned!

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New books on Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle)

Good news for everybody who wants to get started with Pentaho Data Integration: 2 books are in the pipeline.

The first one "Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration: Beginner's Guide" by María Carina Roldán will be published in the next few days. I'll try to get a copy of it. The TOC promises a quite interesting book!

Later this year "Pentaho Kettle Solutions" will be available. This books will be based on the forthcoming PDI 4. It's written by the same team (Roland Bouman, Jos van Dongen) that brought you the excellent "Pentaho Solutions".

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MySQL breakfast presentation on data warehousing

Today I attended a Sun/MySQL presentation in London that focused on data warehousing with MySQL, Infobright and Talend. Overall the presentation gave quite a good overview. The concept of packaging and knowledge layer in Infobright seem quite interesting; and not to worry about indexing is another nice point. I have to look how it compares to Lucid DB or Monet DB at some point when I find some time. I might give the Infobright Community Edition a try.

It was also interesting to see another open source ETL tool. From my point of view the interface of Talend doesn't look as user friendly as Pentaho Kettle, but maybe that's down to the fact that I have been working with Kettle for a long time now. In essence, Kettle will still be my ETL tool of choice.

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How to create a loop in Pentaho Kettle

I finished my first ever video tutorial! This video will demonstrate you how easy it is to create a loop in Pentaho Kettle. Enjoy!

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Rethinking the Pentaho Report Designer Layout

The Pentaho Report Designer (PRD) has evolved to a very feature-rich product. In this article I want to point out one problem that I still have with this product from a usability point of view.

Imagine following scenario: You are about to create a new report for your CEO. In a nutshell the report should have first a summary cross-tab with the essential KPIs and then below some more detailed product data in a standard table (let's keep it simple). 

Now currently you would create the product report/table in the body of your main report and then you would add a subreport to the header, which would reference the cross-tab which lives in a separate reporting file. Now that might all have a technical reason why PRD is set up like this, but from a usability point of view, it is just not an ideal solution. This is a simple example, imaging if we would have to include more subreports in the main report. Another problem with subreports is that you don't really see in the main report if the layout of the subreport is in harmony with the rest of the main report. You have to execute the report in order to see this, then go back to the subreport, execute it again, check if it is fine and if not you have to go back again.

Now it is all easy to sit here and write these lines if you are not involved in developing PRD. I am writing this article as a constructive criticism because I am a big fan of PDR and want to see it become the best report designer. For me, from a user perspective, it would be way easier if PRD offered report type elements that you could drag and drop onto the canvas, just as you would do it now in PRD 3.5 with labels, charts etc. This way you would not be force straight away to follow a specific given structure (Imagine the case where I would only have one chart in a main report in the header and the reporting body/details would be completely unused).

So let's say we would have report elements like "Crosstab Report","Classic table report", etc that you just drag and drop onto the canvas when you need them. Within those elements you define all the necessary settings and you create all the necessary other elements. We are doing this in the same window (we don't have to go to a different window). We control all our data connections in one place and we see all our design in one place.

Over the time Pentaho might introduce various other report type elements, that you then can just drag and drop on the canvas as well. Overall I think that this approach would facilitate designing a report. PRD 3.5 was a huge step forward and I am positive that we will see great new features with the next versions.

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Pentaho Reporting 3.6 Milestone 1 is out!

Great news over on the Pentaho Community Forum! The first milestone of PRD 3.6 has been released. Have a look at the release notes here.

There have been several bug fixes plus the addition of some great new features. I just want to highlight some that are important for me:

• Added OLAP4J (Advanced) and Mondrian (Advanced) datasources. These datasources work exactly as the SQL (Advanced) datasource by allowing the query to be computed by a formula.
• Formulas can be used in parameters now. There are two formula types: Display-value computation for lists, and for all parameters a post-processor.
• Parameter-Support added to OLAP4J (except for members and sets)

Download it now from SourceForge and give it a try!

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