By Nenshad Bardoliwalla

In the wake of the long-running massive industry consolidation in the Enterprise Software industry that reached its zenith with the acquisitions of Business Intelligence market leaders Hyperion, Cognos, and Business Objects in 2007, one could certainly have been forgiven for being less than optimistic about the prospects of innovation in the Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management markets.  This is especially true given the dozens of innovative companies that each of these large best of breed vendors themselves had acquired before being acquired in turn.  While the pace of innovation has slowed to a crawl as the large vendors are midway through digesting the former best of breed market leaders, thankfully for the health of the industry, nothing could be further from the truth in the market overall.  This market has in fact shown itself to be very vibrant, with a resurgence of innovative offerings springing up in the wake of the fall of the largest best of breed vendors. So what are the trends and where do I see the industry evolving to?  Few of these are mutually exclusive, but in order to provide some categorization to the discussion, they have been broken down as follows:
1. We will witness the emergence of packaged strategy-driven execution applications. As we discussed in Driven to Perform: Risk-Aware Performance Management From Strategy Through Execution (Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Stephanie Buscemi, and Denise Broady, New York, NY, Evolved Technologist Press, 2009), the end state for next-generation business applications is not merely to align the transactional execu tion processes contained in applications like ERP, CRM, and SCM with the strategic analytics of performance and risk management of the organization, but for those strategic analytics to literally drive execution.  We called this “Strategy-Driven Execution”, the complete fusion of goals, initiatives, plans, forecasts, risks, controls, performance monitoring, and optimization with transactional processes.  Visionary applications such as those provided by Workday and SalesForce.com with embedded real-time contextual reporting available directly in the application (not as a bolt-on), and Oracle’s entire Fusion suite layering Essbase and OBIEE capabilities tightly into the applications’ logic, clearly portend the increasing fusion of analytic and transactional capability in the context of business processes and this will only increase.

2. The holy grail of the predictive, real-time enterprise will start to deliver on its promises. While classic analytic tools and applications have always done a good job of helping users understand what has happened and then analyze the root causes behind this performance, the value of this information is often stale before it reaches its intended audience. The holy grail of analytic technologies has always been the promise of being able to predict future outcomes by sensing and responding, with minimal latency between event and decision point.  This has become manifested in the resurgence of interest in event-driven architectures that leverage a technology known as Complex Event Processing and predictive analytics.  The predictive capabilities appear to be on their way to break out market acceptance IBM’s significant investment in setting up their Business Analytics and Optimization practice with 4000 dedicated consultants, combined with the massive product portfolio of the Cognos and recently acquired SPSS assets.  Similarly, Complex Event Processing capabilities, a staple of extremely data-intensive, algorithmically-sophisticated industries such as financial services, have also become interesting to a number of other industries that can not deal with the amount of real-time data being generated and need to be able to capture value and decide instantaneously.  Combining these capabilities will lead to new classes of applications for business management that were unimaginable a decade ago.

3. The industry will put reporting and slice-and-dice capabilities in their appropriate places and return to its decision-centric roots with a healthy dose of Web 2.0 style collaboration. It was clear to the pioneers of this industry, beginning as early as H.P. Luhn’s brilliant visionary piece A Business Intelligence System from 1958, that the goal of these technologies was to support business decision-making activities, and we can trace the roots of modern analytics, business intelligence, and performance management to the decision-support notion of decades earlier.  But somewhere along the way, business intelligence became synonymous with reporting and slicing-and-dicing, which is a metaphor that suits analysts, but not the average end-user.  This has contributed to the paltry BI adoption rates of approximately 25% bandied about in the industry, despite the fact that investment in BI and its priority for companies has never been higher over the last five years.  Making report production cheaper to the point of nearly being free, something SaaS BI is poised to do (see above), is still unlikely to improve this situation much. Instead, we will see a resurgence in collaborative decision-centric business intelligence offerings that make decisions the central focus of the offerings.  From an operational perspective, this is certainly in evidence with the proliferation of rules-based approaches that can automate thousands of operational decisions with little human intervention.  However, for more tactical and strategic decisions, mash-ups will allow users to assemble all of the relevant data for making a decision, social capabilities will allow users to discuss this relevant data to generate “crowdsourced” wisdom, and explicit decisions, along with automated inferences, will be captured and correlated against outcomes.  This will allow decision-centric business intelligence to make recommendations within process contexts for what the appropriate next action should be, along with confidence intervals for the expected outcome, as well as being able to tell the user what the risks of her decisions are and how it will impact both the company’s and her own personal performance.

4. Performance, risk, and compliance management will continue to become unified in a process-based framework and make the leap out of the CFO’s office. The disciplines of performance, risk, and compliance management have been considered separate for a long time, but the walls are breaking down, as we documented thoroughly in Driven to Perform.  Performance management begins with the goals that the organization is trying to achieve, and as risk management has evolved from its siloed roots into Enterprise Risk Management, it has become clear that risks must be identified and assessed in light of this same goal context.  Similarly, in the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley, as compliance has become an extremely thorny and expensive issue for companies of all sizes, modern approaches suggest that compliance is ineffective when cast as a process of signing off on thousand of individual item checklists, but rather should be based on an organization’s risks. All three of these disciplines need to become unified in a process-based framework that allows for effective organizational governance.  And while financial performance, risk, and compliance management are clearly the areas of most significant investment for most companies, it is clear that these concerns are now finally becoming enterprise-level plays that are escaping the confines of the Office of the CFO.  We will continue to witness significant investment in sales and marketing performance management, as vendors like Right90 continuing to gain traction in improving the sales forecasting process and vendors like Varicent receive hefty $35 million venture rounds this year, no doubt thanks to experiencing over 100% year over year growth in the burgeoning Sales Performance Management category.  My former Siebel colleague, Bruce Cleveland, now a partner at Interwest, makes the case for this market expansion of performance management into the front-office rather convincingly and has invested correspondingly.

5. SaaS / Cloud BI Tools will steal significant revenue from on-premise vendors but also fight for limited oxygen amongst themselves. From many accounts, this was the year that SaaS-based offerings hit the mainstream due to their numerous advantages over on-premise offerings, and this certainly was in evidence with the significant uptick in investment and market visibility of SaaS BI vendors.  Although much was made of the folding of LucidEra, one of the original pioneers in the space, and while other vendors like BlinkLogic folded as well, vendors like Birst, PivotLink, Good Data, Indicee and others continue to announce wins at a fair clip along with innovations at a fraction of the cost of their on-premise brethren.  From a functionality perspective, these tools offer great usability, some collaboration features, strong visualization capabilities, and an ease-of-use not seen with their on-premise equivalents whereby users are able to manage the system in a self-sufficient fashion devoid of the need for significant IT involvement.  I have long argued that basic reporting and analysis is now a commodity, so there is little reason for any customer to invest in on-premise capabilities at the price/performance ratio that the SaaS vendors are offering (see BI SaaS Vendors Are Not Created Equal ) .  We should thus expect to see continued dimunition of the on-premise vendors BI revenue streams as the SaaS BI value proposition goes mainstream, although it wouldn’t be surprising to see acquisitions by the large vendors to stem the tide.  However, with so many small players in the market offering largely similar capabilities, the SaaS BI tools vendors may wind up starving themselves for oxygen as they put price pressure on each other to gain new customers.  Only vendors whose offerings were designed from the beginning for cloud-scale architecture and thus whose marginal cost per additional user approaches zero will succeed in such a commodity pricing environment, although alternatively these vendors can pursue going upstream and try to compete in the enterprise, where the risks and rewards of competition are much higher.   On the other hand, packaged SaaS BI Applications such as those offered by Host Analytics, Adaptive Planning, and new entrant Anaplan, while showing promising growth, have yet to mature to mainstream adoption, but are poised to do so in the coming years.  As with all SaaS applications, addressing key integration and security concerns will remain crucial to driving adoption.

6. The undeniable arrival of the era of big data will lead to further proliferation in data management alternatives.  While analytic-centric OLAP databases have been around for decades such as Oracle Express, Hyperion Essbase, and Microsoft Analysis Services, they have never held the same dominant market share from an applications consumption perspective that the RDBMS vendors have enjoyed over the last few decades. No matter what the application type, the RDBMS seemed to be the answer.  However, we have witnessed an explosion of exciting data management offerings in the last few years that have reinvigorated the information management sector of the industry.  The largest web players such as Google (BigTable),Yahoo (Hadoop), Amazon (Dynamo), Facebook (Cassandra) have built their own solutions to handle their own incredible data volumes, with the open source Hadoop ecosystem and commercial offerings like CloudEra leading the charge in broad awareness.  Additionally, a whole new industry of DBMSs dedicated to Analytic workloads have sprung up, with flagship vendors like Netezza, Greenplum, Vertica, Aster Data, and the like with significant innovations in in-memory processing, exploiting parallelism, columnar storage options, and more.  We already starting to see hybrid approaches between the Hadoop players and the ADBMS players, and even the largest vendors like Oracle with their Exadata offering are excited enough to make significant investments in this space.  Additionally, significant opportunities to push application processing into the databases themselves are manifesting themselves.  There has never been the plethora of choices available as new entrants to the market seem to crop up weekly.  Visionary applications of this technology in areas like metereological forecasting and genomic sequencing with massive data volumes will become possible at hitherto unimaginable price points.

7. Advanced Visualization will continue to increase in depth and relevance to broader audiences.  Visionary vendors like Tableau, QlikTech, and Spotfire (now Tibco) made their mark by providing significantly differentiated visualization capabilities compared with the trite bar and pie charts of most BI players’ reporting tools.  The latest advances in state-of-the-art UI technologies such as Microsoft’s SilverLight, Adobe Flex, and AJAX via frameworks like Google’s Web Toolkit augur the era of a revolution in state-of-the art visualization capabilities.  With consumers broadly aware of the power of capabilities like Google Maps or the tactile manipulations possible on the iPhone, these capabilities will find their way into enterprise offerings at a rapid speed lest the gap between the consumer and enterprise realms become too large and lead to large scale adoption revolts as a younger generation begins to enter the workforce having never known the green screens of yore.

8. Open Source offerings will continue to make in-roads against on-premise offerings. Much as Saas BI offerings are doing, Open Source offerings in the larger BI market are disrupting the incumbent, closed-source, on-premise vendors.  Vendors like Pentaho and JasperSoft are really starting to hit their stride with growth percentages well above the industry average, offering complete end-to-end BI stacks at a fraction of the cost of their competitors and thus seeing good bottom-up adoption rates.  This is no doubt a function of the brutal economic times companies find themselves experiencing.  Individual parts of the stacks can also be assembled into compelling offerings and receive valuable innovations from both corporate entities as well as dedicated committers: JFreeChart for charting, Actuate’s BIRT for reporting, Mondrian and Jedox’s Palo for OLAP Servers, DynamoBI’s LucidDB for ADBMS, Revolution Computing’s R for statistical manipulation, Cloudera’s enterprise Hadoop for massive data, EsperTech for CEP, Talend for Data Integration / Data Quality / MDM, and the list goes on. These offerings have absolutely reached a level of maturity where they are capable of being deployed in the enterprise right alongside any other commercial closed-source vendor offering.

9. Data Quality, Data Integration, and Data Virtualization will merge with Master Data Management to form a unified Information Management Platform for structured and unstructured data. Data quality has been the bain of information systems for as long as they have existed, causing many an IT analyst to obsess over it, and data quality issues contribute to significant losses in system adoption, productivity, and time spent addressing them.  Increasingly, data quality and data integration will be interlocked hand-in-hand to ensure the right, cleansed data is moved to downstream sources by attacking the problem at its root.  Vendors including SAP BusinessObjects, SAS, Informatica, and Talend are all providing these capabilities to some degree today.  Of course, with the amount of relevant data sources exploding in the enterprise and no way to integrate all the data sources into a single physical location while maintaining agility, vendors like Composite Software are providing data virtualization capabilities, whereby canonical information models can be overlayed on top information assets regardless of where they are located, capable of addressing the federation of batch, real-time and event data sources.  These disparate data soures will need to be harmonized by strong Master Data Management capabilities, whereby the definitions of key entities in the enterprise like customers, suppliers, products, etc. can be used to provide semantic unification over these distributed data sources.  Finally, structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information will all be able to be extracted, transformed, loaded, and queried from this ubiquitious information management platform by leveraging the capabilities of text analytics capabilities that continue to grow in importance and combining them with data virtualization capabilities.

10. Excel will continue to provide the dominant paradigm for end-user BI consumption.  For Excel specifically, the number one analytic tool by far with a home on hundreds of millions of personal desktops, Microsoft has invested significantly in ensuring its continued viability as we move past its second decade of existence, and its adoption shows absolutely no sign of abating any time soon.  With Excel 2010’s arrival, this includes significantly enhanced charting capabilities, a server-based mode first released in 2007 called Excel Services, being a first-class citizen in SharePoint, and the biggest disruptor, the launch of PowerPivot, an extremely fast, scalable, in-memory analytic engine that can allow Excel analysis on millions of rows of data at sub-second speeds. While many vendors have tried in vain to displace Excel from the desktops of the business user for more than two decades, none will be any closer to succeeding any time soon.  Microsoft will continue to make sure of that.

And so ends my list of prognostications for Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management in 2010! What are yours? I welcome your feedback on this list and look forward to hearing your own views on the topic.

Nenshad Bardoliwalla

Nenshad Bardoliwalla is the co-author of Driven to Perform: Risk-Aware Performance Management From Strategy Through Execution and an enterprise software executive with deep expertise in Analytics, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Performance Management, and Governance, Risk, and Compliance.

Questo mio blog qui è definitivamente troppo eterogeneo. E letargico. E’ nato anni fa come blog personale, poi evoluto in semi-professionale. Poi fermatosi. Poi personale di nuovo. Bah.

Nel frattempo – questo il motivo delle pause e del casino, qui – ho bloggato altrove, sempre per lavoro: su oneweb20.it, per poco, e poi invece sul blog dell’azienda per cui lavoro, synthesisblog.com, e poi ancora su qualche altro blog + verticale. Abbiamo aperto da poco il blog di openconsul. E più di recente quello in cui credo molto, moltissimo, di open3.

Il blog è su opensourcebusinessintelligence.it.

Segnalo anche qui una recensione che ho fatto, lì: quella al libro “Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers“, scritto da Will Gorman, pubblicato da Packt.

E mescolo privato e professionale, senza capire bene dove tracciare il confine. Dove finisce carloz e dove inizia c.beschi – per riassumerla, male.

Before we will release a complete comparison of open source ETL tools and after a success of my previous blog post I decided to publish the second transformation that we used in the comparison.

The second transformation is also based on SQL query that I rewrote to ETL transformation. I chose Query 3 from http://www.tpc.org/tpch.

select
l_orderkey,
sum(l_extendedprice*(1-l_discount)) as revenue,
o_orderdate,
o_shippriority
from customer, orders, lineitem
where c_mktsegment = ‘BUILDING’
and c_custkey = o_custkey
and l_orderkey = o_orderkey
and o_orderdate < date ‘1995-03-15’
and l_shipdate > date ‘1995-03-15’
group by l_orderkey, o_orderdate, o_shippriority
order by revenue desc, o_orderdate

Input data are generated by dbgen utility and stored in CSV files.

• lineitem.tbl – 6,001,215 records, 724 MB
• customers.tbl – 15,000 records, 23.2 MB
• orders.tbl – 1,500,000 records, 163 MB

Expected output should contain 11,620 records.

There is a new item in the results. After a discussion in my previous post I added „Pentaho parallel“, Pentaho transformation that reads data in parallel mode. Thanks Matt for your transformation without it I wasn’t able to set it up.

Matt Caster also presented an opinion that Pentaho is discriminated because the transformation sorts the data before aggregation in Pentaho transformation. Yes, I agree that sorting of 6,000,000 records takes a significant amount of execution time of the transformation. But I have no choice, Pentaho aggregate component requires sorted input. Today’s transformation is more fair in this aspect. The number of records flowing to aggregate component is smaller (30,519 records) so they can be easily sorted in memory and the sorting doesn’t influence the total execution time in such volume.

The versions of used ETL tools stay the same ones: CloverETL Designer 2.8.1, Talend Open Studio 3.1.3 and Pentaho Data Integration 3.2.0.

Also the hardware configuration and Java runtime parameters are the same:

• Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1666 Mhz, 2048 MB RAM, 200GB SATA 5400 RPM, Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit.
• -server -Xmx256m -Xmx1536m

Results:

1. CloverETL ParallelReader
2. Talend
3. Pentaho parallel
4. CloverETL UniversalDataReader
5. Pentaho

Transformations and the input data are available on filefactory.com. Today’s transformation are named TPCH2. The transformation from my previous post are named TPCH1.

Please give me a feedback, especially on Talend transformation if it’s correct.

Transformation graphs

CloverETL ParallelReader & UniversalDataReader

Talend

Pentaho

Pentaho parallel

Top 3 Terms people used to find this blog:

1. Pentaho – extjs

2. PRD – BI Server publish password

3. Pentaho cdf

]]> http://buildingbi.com/2009/11/03/tdwi-day-1-open-source-bi-and-data-warehousing-tools/ Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:41:45 +0000 skunkworkscmj http://buildingbi.com/2009/11/03/tdwi-day-1-open-source-bi-and-data-warehousing-tools/ http://nicolasdemarty.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/how-to-easly-integrate-twitter-into-prd-ce-3-5-0-stable-method-2-part-2/ Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:00:15 +0000 nicolasdemarty http://nicolasdemarty.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/how-to-easly-integrate-twitter-into-prd-ce-3-5-0-stable-method-2-part-2/

Now, let’s see how we can send some tweets !

You need a Twitter Account

1. Download cURL and extract it:

Example :  “c:\curl\“.

2. Create a twitter.bat (Example:  “c:\biserver-ce\script\” ) and add the following code:

@echo off
SET input=%1
SET input1=%input:_= %
SET user=xxxx \\your twitter username
SET pwd=xxxx \\your twitter password

\\Warning ABC and the default value in the report must be the same .

if %input%==123 goto case2
c:\curl\curl.exe –user %user%:%pwd% –data “status=%input1%” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml > NUL
echo ok
goto end
:case2
echo nonok
:end

3. Create the following transformation and save twitter.ktr where your report part 1 is located(the report must be somewhere here $ {PENTAHO_DIR}\folderx\).

4. Re-open you report from part 1:

• Create a parameter:

• • Name: Tweet
  • Label: Tweet here:
  • Type: Text Box
  • Value Type: String
  • Default Value: 123 (same as the value in twitter.bat)

• Create a Data Source : Pentaho Data Integration
  • add query1
  • file: $ {PENTAHO_DIR}\folderx\twitter.ktr
  • Step: Done
  • Click “Edit Parameter” then “add” button:
    
    • column: Tweet.

5. Save and Publish.

6. Uncheck: “Auto-Submit” after opening the report.

Enjoy!

Second method:

We will use PRD ce 3.5.0 stable and biserver-ce 3.5.0 .

To Search and Display twitter:

We will use a javascript provided by www.juitter.com.

To tweet:

We will need also cURL provided by http://curl.haxx.se.

We will use PDI ce 3.2.0 stable.

Here is the final result:

We will refer Pentaho-solutions directory as $ {PENTAHO_DIR} and Tomcat webapps directory as ${TOMCAT_HOME}.

1. Download Juitter Javascript:

• Put jquery.juitter.js and jquery-1.3.1.min.js files in ${TOMCAT_HOME}\pentaho\js

2. Create a new file tweet_system.js and past the following code in the same folder:

$(document).ready(function() {
$.Juitter.start({
searchType:”searchWord”, // needed, you can use “searchWord”, “fromUser”, “toUser”
searchObject:”pentaho”, // needed, you can insert a username here or a word to be searched for, if you wish multiple search, separate the words by comma.// The values below will overwrite the ones on the Juitter default configuration.
// They are optional here.
// I’m changing here as an example only
lang:”en”, // restricts the search by the given language
live:”live-15″, // the number after “live-” indicates the time in seconds to wait before request the Twitter API for updates.
placeHolder:”juitterContainer”, // Set a place holder DIV which will receive the list of tweets example <div id=”juitterContainer”></div>
loadMSG: “Loading messages…”, // Loading message, if you want to show an image, fill it with “image/gif” and go to the next variable to set

which image you want to use on
imgName: “loader.gif”, // Loading image, to enable it, go to the loadMSG var above and change it to “image/gif”
total: 20, // number of tweets to be show – max 100
readMore: “Read it on Twitter”, // read more message to be show after the tweet content
nameUser:”image”, // insert “image” to show avatar of “text” to show the name of the user that sent the tweet
openExternalLinks:”newWindow”, // here you can choose how to open link to external websites, “newWindow” or “sameWindow”
filter:”xxx->*BAD word”// insert the words you want to hide from the tweets followed by what you want to show instead example: “xxx->censured” or “xxx->BLOCKED WORD” you can define as many as you want, if you don’t want to replace the word, simply remove it, just add the words you want separated like this “xxx”… Be aware that the tweets will still be showed, only the bad words will be removed
});
$(“#juitterSearch”).submit(function(){
$.Juitter.start({

searchType:”searchWord”,

searchObject:$(“.juitterSearch”).val(),
live:”live-20″, // it will be updated every 20 seconds
filter:”xxx->*BAD word”
});
return false;
});
});

3. Create a new PRD report

• In the Master Report/Attributes tab add the following values:

• output-format:html.
• lock-ouptut-fomat:check.
• append-header:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”../mantle/twitter.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />
<script language=”javascript” src=”../js/jquery-1.3.1.min.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script language=”javascript” src=”../js/jquery.juitter.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script language=”javascript” src=”../js/tweet_system.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

4. Create a new file tweet_system.js and past the following code in ${TOMCAT_HOME}\pentaho\mantle folder :

/*JUITTER PLUGIN CSS*/

#juitterContainer{padding: 2px;} /*Juitter container*/
#juitterContainer .twittList{margin:0;padding:0;} /* UL that will contain the list of tweets */

/* Bellow the list of tweets “<li>” */

#juitterContainer .twittLI{list-style:none;background:#f1f1f1;margin:0;padding:5px 0 0 0;border-bottom:dashed 1px #d11d1d;padding:3px;clear:both;height:55px;}
#juitterContainer .twittList SPAN.time{color:#777;font-size:0.9em}
#juitterContainer .twittList A{color:#d11d1d;} /*Links inside the tweets list */

/* Bellow the CSS for the avatar image  */

#juitterContainer .juitterAvatar{float:left;border:solid 1px #d11d1d;background:#FFF;margin-right:5px;padding:2px;width:48px;;height:48px;}
#juitterContainer .jRM{float:right;clear:both} /*read it on twitter link*/
#juitterContainer .extLink{} /*CSS for the external links*/
#juitterContainer .hashLink{} /*CSS for the hash links*/

/*end of Juitter CSS*/

body{margin:0;padding:50px;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px;background:black;}
#content{width:440px;float:left;}
#juitterSearch{margin:0;padding:0 0 0 0;border-bottom:solid 1px #d11d1d;padding: 10px;}
#juitter{width:440px;background:#f1f1f1;float:left;border:solid 2px #d11d1d;}

/* Image*/

#pentaho_logo .pentaho_lg{background:#f1f1f1;border:solid 1px #d11d1d;}
#juitter_logo .juitter_lg{background:#f1f1f1;border:solid 1px #d11d1d;}

5. Drag and drop a Label in Page Header and add the following values:

• name: tweet.
• xml-id:juitter
• append-body-footer:

<form method=”post” id=”juitterSearch” action=”">
<p>Search Twitter:
<input type=”text” value=”Search here” size=”65″ />
<input type=submit value=”Submit”/>
</p>
</form>
<div id=”juitterContainer”></div>

6. Save and Publish

Your report must looks like that :

• For multiple search : separate words by comma.

First method:

we will use a javascript provided by www.tweetgrid.com.

In a new report:

• In the Master Report/Attributes tab add the following values:
  • output-format:html.
  • lock-ouptut-fomat:check.
  • append-header:

<script src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.3/prototype.js”></script>

• Drag and drop a Label in Page Header and add the following values:
  • value:Select a tweet!.
  • append-body-footer:

<form style=”display:inline”>
<select id=”selection” name=”sessionid” onchange=”filterChanged()”>
<option>pentaho</option>
<option>twetter</option>
<option>SAP</option>
<option>Cognos</option>
<option>talend</option>
</select>
</form>
<script language=”javascript”>var currentValue = ‘pentaho’;</script>
<script>

function filterChanged() {
var select = $(’selection’);
var currentValue = select.options[select.selectedIndex].text;
changeFilter(1,currentValue);
}
function changeFilter(i,search) {
jtw_settings[i].jtw_search=search;
jtw_settings[i].jtw_pre_html=”tweet for: <B>”+search+”</B>”;
jtw_settings[i].jtw_widget_refresh_interval=9;
jtw_settings[i].jtw_widget_refresh_interval_min=9;
jtw_settings[i].jtw_widget_refresh_interval_max=20;
jtw_settings[i].jtw_lastid=0;
jtw_settings[i].jtw_type=”search”;
jtw_refresh_clbk(i);
}
</script>

• Drag and drop second Label in Page Header and add the following values:
  • value:“put a space here”.
  • name:tweeter.
  • xml-id:tweeter.
  • append-body:

<script language=”javascript”>
var jtw_divname = ‘tweet_1′
var jtw_search                 = ‘pentaho’;
var jtw_pre_html               = ‘tweet for : <B>pentaho</B>’;
var jtw_post_html             =’ ‘;

</script>
<script src=”http://tweetgrid.com/widget/widget.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

• Save and publish.

Your report must looks like that:

On Oct. 21 OpenSys released a new version of its ETL tool, CloverETL Designer version 2.8.1. It’s mainly bugfix version but also brings a new component, ParallelReader, that makes delimited data file (CSV) processing faster than ever before.

I decided to make a test and compare ParallelReader’s performance with CloverETL’s UniversalDataReader and also with two ETL competitors Talend Open Studio (3.1.3) and Pentaho Data Integration (3.2.0).

As a testing task I chose simple SQL query and I tried to rewrite it to ETL transformation.

select
l_returnflag,
l_linestatus,
sum(l_quantity) as sum_qty,
sum(l_extendedprice) as sum_base_price,
sum(l_extendedprice*(1-l_discount)) as sum_disc_price,
sum(l_extendedprice*(1-l_discount)*(1+l_tax)) as sum_charge,
avg(l_quantity) as avg_qty,
avg(l_extendedprice) as avg_price,
avg(l_discount) as avg_disc,
count(*) as count_order
from lineitem
where l_shipdate <= date ‘1998-09-03’
group by l_returnflag, l_linestatus
order byl_returnflag, l_linestatus;

This query is one of standard queries used for performance testing of database engines. More info on http://www.tpc.org/tpch/. The dataset for testing was generated by dbgen utility available on tpc.org too. The size of dataset is 725MB.

All transformation was run on my laptop: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1666 Mhz, 2048 MB RAM, 200GB SATA 5400 RPM, Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit.

Java parameters was set up to -server -Xmx256m -Xmx1536m.

The results aren’t surprising :

1. CloverETL – ParallelReader
2. CloverETL – UniversalDataReader
3. Talend
4. Pentaho

If you don’t trust me you can verify results on your own computer. All transformation graphs and testing dataset are available on rapidshare.com or filefactory.com (200 MB). CloverETL Designer can be downloaded on www.cloveretl.com.

Deeper and more extensive comparison will be published soon. Watch www.cloveretl.com, watch this blog. The latest news about CloverETL are also available on CloverETL linkedin group and CloverETL facebook group. Don’t hesitate and join.

Transformation graphs

CloverETL ParallelReader

CloverETL UniversalDataReader

Talend

Pentaho

The nature of the Business Intelligence industry is changing. Major acquisitions of the past few years have seen most of the traditional players rolled into the mega vendors, and now we are staring to see the emergence of alternative solutions. One of these is Open Source. In this Q&A Yellowfin CEO Glen Rabie talks about the business Intelligence industry and his take on the open source players.

Q. What is your attitude towards open source?

A. Yellowfin is philosophically very supportive of the open source movement and we have engineered our tools so they live inside an open source sandwich. They run on Linux and other open source systems. We have some significant components of our solution that are open source such as JFreeChart and Tomcat.

Q. Do you face much competition from open source?

A. I don’t think we do. It’s a political movement as well as a technical effort. People who buy our products don’t typically want to buy open source because they want to acquire a total solution – which includes a high level of technical support as well as an integrated end-to-end presentation layer. Do you want a mission critical customer facing reporting portal that’s not as well supported? Arguably a commercial product can bring about better support these days, maybe that won’t be the case in the future. But at this point our general philosophy is that we like the open source movement, we are not challenging it, or challenged by it, and we welcome it into the Business Intelligence community because it’s a hotbed of open research that we benefit from and like to contribute to.

Q. Where do you see most of the use of open source BI?

A. We generally see open source BI within other software applications, rather than within the enterprise. I think this is because the open source products and their high requirement for developer customisation are more suited to a development environment. Having said that though, we are also seeing a trend whereby Software vendors are looking to embed greater levels of BI functionality into their apps. They are looking for functionality such as self service reporting, which is not exactly the open source forte. If offered then the issue with open source BI tools is that they are a loosely coupled set of applications which have been developed and continue to be developed in isolation. Yellowfin is a single integrated solution which is making it easy for vendors to integrate and deploy analytical applications to their customers.

Q. What do you think of the open source trend in BI – where is it heading?

A. This is an interesting one. If I am going to be a bit controversial on this, I would have to say that there is actually no true ‘open source’ BI platform. The model in use by the likes of BIRT and Pentaho is a hybrid and more of a marketing position than a true commitment to open source.  To test this position I would say let’s take a step back and look at the goals of open source and then see if these principles are being applied to the Business intelligence open source vendors. Does the hybrid model of commercial open source actually deliver on the principles of transparency, openness and availability of source code. Taking a big deep breath one would have to say not.  I think that open source as far as it has been applied to the BI market is really about a small sub segment of product– Reporting not analytics. Any valued added component such as dashboards, scheduling and security are shipped under a commercial model. A Recent comment to me by a software vendor underpins this, “BIRT is what it is… but if you want end user ad hoc reporting you may as well evaluate all commercial options.” In my view the open source play is about baiting the customer and using core products as part of an up sell strategy. What we are seeing in the market is a continued march towards this paradigm – a greater focus on the commercial side of the business rather than the open source one.

Q. Is the recent purchase by Pentaho of Lucidera’s front end a case in point?

A. That is exactly what it is. Pentaho have more than bent the open source model with this purchase, and in all likelihood have lost their way. They have bought a great interface but you can just imagine the management team sitting around and saying – hey this is to good to be open source – lets keep it closed. Compare this behaviour with the likes of Redhat who have open sourced their recent acquisition of Metamatrix. The Lucidera acquisition is destined to remain closed source and a pure commercial play. Simply their actions indicate a very low level of commitment to the open source philosophy. So now as a customer of Pentaho you have this interesting scenario where you have to manage the different contractual obligations you have with them based on the product set you wish to use, this adds an enormous amount of complexity to the deal.

Q. How do you reconcile this view with Yellowfin’s use of open source?

A. As I mention earlier, there is a role for open source products and some components do make sense for us. However, what we do is manage the support and complexity for our end customer. We provide a wrapper for these products and deliver them as an integrated product. In some cases such as JFree Chart they are core to the product. In others, such as BIRT or Jasper renderers these are provided as a mechanism to provide the client with the choice of authoring tool that suits their particular needs. Again we recognise that customers who use these open source tools are not getting a ‘total solution’ and Yellowfin basically offers to fill the gaps. Not unlike the open source guys. We are just transparent about our business model.

Q. Well if that is the case how would you say that Yellowfin differs from open source providers?

A. On a business level, I would say that we have a lot in common with open source philosophy. We are incredibly focussed on developing a community around Yellowfin and increasing, the level of our community’s engagement with product development. Where we fundamentally differ though is on our approach to product development. Generally the rule of thumb of BI deployments is that about 80% of the cost is implementation related. Yellowfin has a huge focus on usability and we continue to develop and refine the interface accordingly. Our goal is to lower the level of implementation effort required and it is this philosophy that is at odds with the open source service revenue model. The major benefit of Yellowfin over Open Source is the cost of implementation and time to market. So whilst at a high level yes you can have the similar functionality with open source and their associated commercial products it is incumbent upon the consumers to build a BI development competency within their company to hook all the pieces together, and that is not the way we do business.

The more people I talk to about the BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match we conducted last month, the more interest there seems to be in putting more vendors in the ring for another round. So, I created another poll to get your input. Whether you’re in Chicago or not, I’d like to know …  If you could assemble any three of these vendors in a room to square off in a no-holds-barred confrontation about whose tool is tops in the BI space, who would they be?

• Select any three.
• Feel free to write in an “other”.
• Remember, if you vote for SAP, Microsoft, Pentaho, or IBM then you’re voting to bring these guys back for round 2.  (Read more about the first round with these four vendors: Original BI Tool Vendor grudge match.)

L’open source n’est pas qu’une philosophie et les entreprises qui ont choisi ce mode de distribution pour leur logiciel et non le model commercial traditionnel doivent aussi en passer par la croissance externe pour se développer. C’est ainsi que Pentaho vient de racheter l’éditeur SaaS de business intelligence LucidEra.

Cet outil d’analyse des données en ligne sera ajouté aux offres “Pentaho Analysis Enterprise Edition” et “Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition” sans changement de prix. Malheureusement, je pense que l’on ne retrouvera jamais la technologie Clearview de LuciEra dans la version community.

Source

Based on the previous post you are now able to create a report looking like that:

Let’s try to publish this report.

1.) Pentaho BI Server CE configuration:

We will refer BI Server directory as ${BIServer}.

• Open ${BIServer}\pentaho-solutions\systems\publisher_config.xml
• add a password : <publisher-password>MyPassword</publisher-password>
• Copy the following file ${pdi}\libext\JDBC\sqlitejdbc-v037-nested.jar into ${BIServer}\tomcat\common\lib\
• Start BI Server: ${Biserver}\start-pentaho.bat

2.) Publish your report

• Menu: File\Publish…
• parameters to add in the first window:

URL: http://localhost:8080/pentaho

User: joe

Password: password

• In the Publish To Server window add the following parameters

Report Name: MyFirstReport

Report Description: My report description

Location:  Location where you want to save your report

Publishing Password: MyPassword

• Press OK Button.

3.)Access Pentaho through your brother

• http://localhost:8080/pentaho
• Select Joe in the list of value and press Login
• Navigate through your folder to find the report
• Click on the report

if you don’t see your report:  refresh your Repository Cache (Menu Tools\Refresh\Repository Cache)

You must see something like that now:

Great you just publish your First Report.

Next Post: How to integrate twitter in a report.

Pentaho, a commercial open-source business intelligence vendor, has acquired LucidEra’s Web-based interactive reporting tools for non-technical business users.

Pentaho on Monday said LucidEra’s Clearview product would be packaged as Pentaho Analyzer Enterprise Edition. The software will be offered as the front-end interface of Pentaho’s on-premise and cloud-based analytics product line. Financial details were not disclosed

LucidEra in June acknowledged that a sale of its assets was possible due to the company’s inability to raise venture capital in the economic downturn. In the opinion of some industry observers, LucidEra offered a fairly narrow forecast-to-billing application that was most useful to Salesforce.com customers.

Pentaho and JasperSoft are the leading open-source BI suite vendors. Pentaho offers a community, open-source edition of its product and an enterprise edition that’s extended with non-open-source components. The company released a major upgrade of its suite in March.

LucidEra’s inability to remain viable as a SaaS BI vendor led to speculation on whether the model was adaptable to BI. However, SaaS vendors that take a broader view about sharing and analyzing data continue to offer alternatives to on-premise software. Those companies include CrystalReports.com, PivotLink, Oco, and Birst.

Pentaho and other commercial open-source vendors have increased the capabilities of their products while marketing them as far less expensive than closed-source applications. However, open-source BI in general is years behind “in delivering solutions adapted to the needs of particular employees and business domains, and in providing robust, mature end-user tools,” Seth Grimes, an analytics strategist with Alta Plana, said in a recent report published by Intelligent Enterprise, a BI-focused site on the InformationWeek business technology network.

This article is about connecting Pentaho Report Designer CE 3.5.0 RC2 (aka prd-ce-3.5.0 -RC2) to SQLite.

If it is not already done, you will have to download from www.pentaho.com or www.sourceforge.net:

• pdr-ce-3.5.0-RC2.
• pdi-ce-3.2.0-stable (Pentaho data integration).
• biserver-ce-3.5.0.RC2. (Pentaho BI Server Community Edition)
• SQLite-3.6.18 at http://www.sqlite.org.

1.) Create a Test Database:

We will refer SQLite directory as ${SQLite}

For Microsoft Windows:

• run a cmd
• go to ${SQLite} folder
• run the command sqlite3.exe test.sqlite3 (launch the SQLite console)
• create test table: “CREATE TABLE test(name varchar(10));”
• insert rows: “INSERT INTO test VALUES (‘aaaa’); INSERT INTO test VALUES (‘bbbb’); INSERT INTO test VALUES (‘cccc’);”
• check: “SELECT * FROM test”
• exit SQLite Console: “.quit”

2.) Add SQLite connector to prd:

${pdi} is the directory where pdi is located.

$(prd} is the directory where prd is located.

Copy the following file ${pdi}\libext\JDBC\sqlitejdbc-v037-nested.jar into ${prd}\lib\jdbc.

3.) Launch report designer

• Create a new connection.

Connection name: test.

Connection type: SQLite.

Access: Native(JDBC).

Database name: ${SQLite}\test.sqlite3 (in my case test.sqlite3 is located at C:\SQLite. My database name is: \SQLite\test.sqlite).

4.) You can now create your report.

Next Article: How to run this report on the Pentaho BI Server (a 2 minutes configuration).

Post 3 in a series of 4, in which I share my thoughts on how our vendors did at the BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match last week, and on the details of their presentations. You might also check out my summary post a couple weeks ago on PBI.

Company: Pentaho
Presenter: Lance Walter, VP, Marketing
At Pentaho: 4 years
In BI: 19 years
Gift selected: Capstone Bag

Pentaho has existed for 5 yrs. Lance was VP of Product Marketing for BusinessObjects before Pentaho. Before that at Siebel, Hyperion, and Oracle.

Pentaho is an open source solution to BI. Lance touted the depth and breadth of the team assembled at Pentaho from many other BI companies with many years experience, talking a bit about awards for Pentaho and their customers.

He mentioned that it was important to focus on what it means to be successful in BI and cited slides from TDWI, but didn’t really spell much out. He did admit that a single tool isn’t going to be a silver bullet. He said, “You can succeed or fail with any tool.” Kudos! Love that honesty.

Lance’s “angle” (his word) is that Pentaho requires very little investment (being pretty much free and all), so return is easy to come by.

Pentaho spends a lot of time handling in-bound sales calls and little on marketing and pursuing out-bound sales. Interesting.

Lance sees a lot of “requirements distortion” in other vendors’ proposals. He feels many other vendors view their solution as a hammer, so every problem becomes a nail. I think there’s a certain amount of truth to that. But he did little to differentiate why Pentaho was different other than just saying it is.

Open Source TCO is often assumed / rumored to be very high, This is because in the old days there was no single throat to choke, no accountability, few standards, etc. Many of these risks have been fairly well mitigated. Pentaho’s for-profit corporate umbrella and support contracts serve to significantly address these concerns. I, for one, am far less leery about leveraging the Linux’s, Pentaho’s and MySQL’s of the world now than I was 10 or even 5 years ago.  Lance made this case with a story that demonstrated how little evidence there is remaining to make this kind of high TCO case against Pentaho. All good, and I think his story is telling.

Of course he highlighted the strength of having an open-source community continually working on improving their software. And I do think that’s a strength, especially given that Pentaho is managing/prioritizing requirements, performing quality control, and leading (supplementing) the community with paid on-staff development teams. Plus, when the community submits code back to Pentaho, then Pentaho is on the hook to support it, maintain it, update it, etc. Very beneficial symbiosis.

“IDC has talked about how open source is the most significant IT trend in the last 20 years … bigger than client-server, bigger than thin-client applications, etc.” I gotta say, I’m not sure I buy that. But whatever. I put only limited stock in the analysts and the pundits anyway.

Gartner found that Pentaho customers rated them very highly for customer satisfaction. Impressive, and flies in the face of the old perspective of open-source as “built in someone’s garage.”

Gartner also has evidently validated the Pentaho model as a good strategy for penetrating a market that’s continually trying to decrease TCO.

Lance touted the interoperability of Pentaho’s tool suite with other vendor’s tools. This is great. I’m all for primary integration at the data warehouse level, not at the presentation tool level. However, there’s a real concrete cost to having multiple tools in-house. Many companies have a hard time getting their people up to speed on one tool, let alone two.

I thought the most devastating blow he landed on the competition, though, was when he talked about how the customers of other vendors would receive maintenance invoices for the coming year and suddenly be highly motivated to consider Pentaho as a potential replacement to the systems they have in-house. Obviously, there would be much more involved in that kind of switch than just deciding to pay a bill or not, but it does give you pause … as well it should the big “expensive” vendors.

Overall, I grade this presentation:  A-

Part 1 of 2:

Part 2 of 2:

I discovered Pentaho today – they are the company behind an open-source, advanced BI Platform. As they so succinctly put it themselves on SourceForge:

[Pentaho is] a complete business intelligence platform that includes reporting, analysis (OLAP), dashboards, data mining and data integration (ETL). Use it as a full suite or as individual components that are accessible via web services. Ranked #1 in open source BI.

I’ve only played around with their Java based report designer so far, but it seems pretty good. It’ll connect to a wide variety of datasources through JDBC (that’s the Java version of the ever popular OBDC) including the big guns like Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL. The designer itself is really easy to pick up, just drag and drop the fields from your query onto the report page, add in a few labels and you can output the report to PDF, TXT, RTF or to their own report server.

Anyway for the wonderful price of nothing, it certainly seems quite competitive with the much more expensive Crystal Reports and SQL Server Reporting Services (although I like that too!). Of course the report designer doesn’t come anywhere near my personal favourite, Telerik Reporting.

Your all–in–one resource for using Pentaho with MySQL for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

Open–source Pentaho provides business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing solutions at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions. Now you can take advantage of Pentaho for your business needs with this practical guide written by two major participants in the Pentaho community.

The book covers all components of the Pentaho BI Suite. You′ll learn to install, use, and maintain Pentaho–and find plenty of background discussion that will bring you thoroughly up to speed on BI and Pentaho concepts.

• Of all available open source BI products, Pentaho offers the most comprehensive toolset and is the fastest growing open source product suite
• Explains how to build and load a data warehouse with Pentaho Kettle for data integration/ETL, manually create JFree (pentaho reporting services) reports using direct SQL queries, and create Mondrian (Pentaho analysis services) cubes and attach them to a JPivot cube browser
• Review deploying reports, cubes and metadata to the Pentaho platform in order to distribute BI solutions to end–users
• Shows how to set up scheduling, subscription and automatic distribution

The companion Web site provides complete source code examples, sample data, and links to related resources.

Your one–stop resource for open source BI and data warehousing solutions

Pentaho is a full–featured, open source Business Intelligence suite that lets you build data warehouses and rich, powerful BI applications at a fraction of the cost of a proprietary solution. This book gets you up and running with Pentaho within minutes: right from the start you′ll be running example reports, dashboards, and OLAP pivot tables while you learn about Pentaho concepts and architecture. Using a practical case study, you′ll learn what dimensional modeling is and how to apply it to design a data warehouse. You′ll create and populate your data warehouse with Pentaho data integration tools. Finally, you′ll learn how to build your own BI applications on top of your data warehouse using Pentaho reporting, analysis, dashboarding, and data mining tools.

• Understand important Pentaho concepts, including action sequences and the solution repository
• Apply the key concepts of dimensional modeling and construct a data warehouse using star schemas
• Use Pentaho data integration tools to build ETL applications
• Explore advanced PDI features including remote execution and clustering
• Design and deploy reports and charts using Pentaho Report Designer
• Leverage OLAP and create interactive pivot tables with drill up/drill down using Pentaho Analysis Services
• Concentrate and compact BI content for business users with comprehensive dashboards
• Discover and explore patterns in your data using Pentaho data mining

BUY HERE

BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match

Yesterday’s ITA BI Roundtable was designed to be a face off … cage match … smackdown … between popular BI tool vendors. According to those who observed the carnage first hand, it was a great session. Gene Gladell, a regular participant at roundtable sessions, said that “this totally exceeded my expectations.” That’s good enough for me.

IBM, Microsoft, Pentaho (popular open source BI solution), and SAP were invited to attend. As roundtable chairman, I organized the event on behalf of the ITA and Capstone Consulting.

Thought I’d toss out a bit of a summary of the event. I charged participating vendors with …

Vendor Presentations

Make a brief presentation to the group addressing the question, “Why does your tool yield a greater ROI than the other tools represented?”  We limited them to 12 minutes each, and each laid out their case for being the best business value to their customers. We video taped the whole thing, and I’ll get it posted soon, along with summaries of their most salient points. In the meantime, if you attended the session, you should take my poll on LinkedIn and let me know whom you feel “won the debate.” I gotta say I’m curious what you think. Also, stay tuned for much more info.

Presenters where (in order of their presentations; which was randomly selected before the session):

• From Microsoft, Dan Vandercar, Technical Pre-Sales
• From SAP BusinessObjects: Shawn Blevins, Global Group Director
• From Pentaho: Lance Walter, VP Marketing
• From IBM Cognos: Paula Doyle, Account Executive

Best Breakfast Award

Bring breakfast. Everyone brought eats, and I had attendees vote on who got it right. IBM walked away with the “Breakfast Best Practices” award for the day. Hats off to the IBM Cognos marketing team!

Book Giveaway

Bring books to give away. To the members who brought the most new folks to the meeting (sounds like a 12-step program when I say it that way, doesn’t it? – sigh!), we gave out prizes. Good prizes, in fact. Four attendees walked away with brand-spankin’ new books on implementing BI solutions with each vendor’s stack.  Congratulations to …

• Tim Strudeman got first pick, he selected the Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit
• Jordan Martz scored Pentaho Solutions: BI / DW in Pentaho and MySQL
• Our very own Louis Giokis ended up with an IOU from SAP for a book to be named later — gotta work on those guys
• And Joan Matz made off with the IBM Cognos 8 BI Official Guide

Panel Discussion and Comparative Product Matrix

Answer questions from the group. Participants (both before the session and during) submitted a whole heap of questions targeted at our participating BI vendors. Capstone distilled these down to 36 solid questions. We asked 9 of these in a one-hour panel discussion in our session yesterday after vendor presentations. Each vendor was given 60 seconds to respond. They’ve all also committed to answering in writing. Once completed, I’ll be publishing this tomb for reference to the BI community. I think this will be a valuable tool; can’t wait to get it done.

Another Session Required?

There was so much interest and participation in this session that we’re considering doing another one. MicroStrategy, Information Builders, and InfoBright have all already expressed interest, and I think Oracle should be involved at some point. Besides, the only thing better than a comparative matrix of four BI tools is a comparative matrix of eight BI tools, right?  What do you think?  Good idea to rinse and repeat with new vendors? Maybe in the Spring?

Feedback Welcome

If you attended this session, you should post your comments. I’d love to hear your feedback on the Grudge Match, and suggestions on how we could improve it.

Tengo que agradecer a Roland Bouman y Jos van Dongen por enviarme una versión de su libro Pentaho Solutions recién salido del horno y que voy a leer durante las dos próximas semanas con detalle para ofrecer un review del mismo. En todo caso, el índice apunta ya que es un libro muy recomendable para todos aquellos interesados en profundizar en la plataforma de pentaho.

Estad atentos a la review en aproximadamente dos semanas.

Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5 Lets Users Design Reports and Dashboards Easily, allows OEMs/SaaS Companies to Embed BI Cost Effectively, and provides programs to Escape the Cost and Complexity of Proprietary BI

Orlando, FL – August 31, 2009 – Pentaho Corporation, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5, designed to provide an efficient and easy to use report authoring environment, technical and packaging changes to enable broad use of Pentaho for embedded BI by OEMs and SaaS providers, and a first-of-its-kind migration program to address customer demands to move away from proprietary BI solutions. The current economic climate has put even greater pressure on IT budgets with the need to do more with less, and this latest BI suite makes it easier than ever for enterprises that are frustrated by the cost and complexity of proprietary BI to turn to Pentaho as a proven alternative.

NEWS SUMMARY

• Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5 includes a new Pentaho Report Designer that provides unmatched productivity for report authors as well as new self-service capabilities that empower business users to create new BI content in Pentaho Dashboard Designer.
• Based on partner success and growing demand to embed BI into third-party applications for on-premise and SaaS deployment, Pentaho is now offering Pentaho Reporting Embedded Edition, which includes technology and documentation enhancements along with simplified royalty-free pricing for organizations that embed Pentaho.
• With Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5, Pentaho is now offering the Escape program, a fixed-price, fixed-deliverable service to convert reports from traditional proprietary BI tools to commercial open source BI from Pentaho for as little as $100 per report. 

NEW FEATURES IN PENTAHO BI SUITE VERSION 3.5

Design:

• Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5 includes a completely new, innovative Report Designer that provides report authors with valuable capabilities including a streamlined report design wizard, an interactive preview mode that lets authors view changes in real-time without toggling between design and preview modes, the ability to easily add dynamic, cascading parameters to reports in the designer, and more. And a new thin-client report viewer lets users change parameters, change output formats, or jump to a specific page while viewing reports.
• Pentaho Dashboard Designer 3.5 builds on Pentaho’s self-service dashboard creation for business users by providing the ability to easily create new data and chart visualizations in Pentaho’s thin-client user console. Pentaho’s centralized metadata layer allows business users to query data in business terms without knowledge of underlying database structures or SQL.

Deploy:

• Based on proven partner success and growing demand to embed BI into third-party applications for on-premise and SaaS deployment, Pentaho is now offering Pentaho Reporting Embedded Edition. From a technical perspective, Pentaho Reporting Embedded Edition now incorporates all of the resources required by a report including query information, images, layout, and templates into a single file, simplifying deployment and maintenance.
• Pentaho is now offering unlimited-use pricing for OEMs who want to embed and distribute Pentaho BI, with low-cost, royalty-free pricing and no per-cpu, per-user, or per-customer fees. Pentaho now also provides an embedding guide with step-by-step instructions for embedded deployment.

Escape:

• Building on its public track record of successful customer migrations from proprietary BI solutions, Pentaho is now offering the Escape program to scale Pentaho’s migration capacity while reducing migration costs for customers. Starting at $5,000 for the first 25 reports, and for as little as $100 per report with larger volumes, Pentaho’s Escape program offers conversion from Actuate e.Reports, Brio, Cognos Impromptu, Crystal Reports, and Oracle Reports. Frustrated proprietary BI customers now have a proven, low-risk, low-cost path to commercial open source BI from Pentaho.
• Pentaho is also offering free 30-day evaluations of Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition Version 3.5, downloadable from the Pentaho website. 

CUSTOMER QUOTES AND DETAILS

• “We’re very impressed with the new report and dashboard design capabilities in Pentaho BI Suite 3.5,” said Noah Meister, vice president of Information Technology at Boyne Resorts. Boyne Resorts is the third largest resort network in the U.S., and switched to Pentaho from Crystal Reports. “The product has matured very rapidly over the last couple of releases thanks to the efforts of Pentaho and the Pentaho community.”
• “We chose Pentaho’s open source offering over proprietary options years ago and we never looked back,” said Darrin Blocker, Decision Support Services at Loma Linda University Health Care. “Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5 gives a lot of power and flexibility to our report authors, and our business users will appreciate the enhanced self-service capabilities.”
• Prospective users are invited to test-drive Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition version 3.5 using a live interactive demonstration application, or by downloading a free 30-day evaluation, both available at www.pentaho.com.
• Both classroom and online training are available immediately for Pentaho BI Suite 3.5. Course and schedule details are available at http://www.pentaho.com/services/training/ .
• Pentaho is offering a Techcast on Pentaho BI Suite 3.5 on September 15 at 2pm eastern. Register at http://www.pentaho.com/events/20090915-Pentaho-Version3-5/

Pentaho 3.5 est arrivée il n’y a pas très longtemps et pour vous faciliter le passage sur leur plateforme de Business Intelligence, Pentaho lance une nouvelle offre : Escape.

Escape est conçue pour les entreprises qui ont actuellement des reportings sur les outils Actuate e.reports, Brio, Cognos Impromptu, Crystal Reports et Oracle Reports Services afin des les aider à migrer vers la solution de reporting de Pentaho. Pour la somme de 5 000$ Pentaho vous propose de migrer vos 25 premiers rapports vers leur plateforme.

Voila une offre intéressante car c’est vrai que le changement d’outil de reporting peut être un frein, surtout si la nouvelle technologie n’est pas maitrisée. Cela nécessitera un effort pour définir les 25 rapports les plus important mais pour 5 000$ cela est une offre raisonnable et pratique. Si vous voulez plus de renseignements, il y a le pdf de l’offre.

La promo pour cette offre est originale et Pentaho se voit en super héros pour l’occasion

Berikut cara menambahkan Oracle data source di Pentaho BI. Instalasi Pentaho di Centos 5.2.

1. Pastikan Oracle client sudah terinstall. Saya menggunakan file instalasi 10201_client_linux32.zip. Yang terpenting dari instalasi client ini adalah ketersediaan oracle driver (.jar) ojdbc14.jar.
2. Copykan oracle driver (ojdbc14.jar) ke jdbc folder admin console:
   $ cp $HOME_ORACLE/product/10.2.0/client_1/ojdbc14.jar $PENTAHO-HOMEDIR/administration-console/jdbc
3. Login ke frontend admin console http://yourserver:8099/
4. Goto Administration > Data Sources
5. Klik tanda (+) untuk menambahkan data sources
   Name: nama data source
Driver class: oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver
Username: *****
Password: *****
URL: jdbc:oracle:thin:@XX.XX.XX.XX:1521:*******
6. Pada tab “Advanced” isikan value:
   Maximum Active Connections: 20
Number of Idle Connections: 5
Validation Query: select 1 from dual
Wait: (milliseconds): 1000
7. Lakukan test connection
8. Done.

NOTES: pada point 5 (advanced value) di atas -kecuali Validation Query- saya copykan dari values setting MySQL database. Masih belum mendapatkan referensi yang tepat untuk konfigurasi Oracle. Saya masih belum ada ilmu untuk nilai-nilai tersebut . Dikuatirkan membuat BI platform atau Oracle unstable . Jika Anda memiliki referensi, pls updatenya. Thanks!