Hey DBAs! Are you seeking more efficient ways of shifting through your data to aid your business operations? Two popular Business Intelligence products have community Open Source software are Pentaho and JasperSoft. And both work with MySQL.

Both are easy to download and install. Both will use a JDBC connector to connect to MySQL. But how easy are the two to configure and run a simple report against a running instance of MySQL?


Setting up a JDBC connection with JasperSoft or Pentaho is pretty much like using any other JDBC connection.
The …

Dear Kettle fans,

A few weeks ago, when I was stuck in the US after the MySQL User Conference, a new book was published by Packt Publishing.

That all by itself is something that is not too remarkable.  However, this time it’s a book about my brainchild Kettle. That makes this book very special to me. The full title is Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration : Beginner’s Guide (Amazon, Packt).  The title all by itself explains the purpose of this book: give the reader a quick-start when it comes to Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle).

The author María Carina Roldán ( …

As a followup to my previous post about comparing numeric values, I've since discovered a little more about the problem. To repeat my original problem: certain numeric field values that should be equal are being detected as different in the Filter rows step. I think it's important to be able to perform accurate comparisons since it is a frequent task in data quality analysis.

Originally, I assumed this had something to do with jdbc. However, since I can re-produce the issue without any SQL, I'm sure this has nothing to do with the version of the MySQL Connector/J jdbc driver. I tried the 5.0.8 version of the driver and I observed the same behavior. I couldn't even get my transform to work correctly with the 5.1.12 version of the connector -- it does not recognize column aliases in my SQL query.

Now for the rest of the …

As requested by a few fans out there, here are the slides of my presentation:

Pentaho Data Integration 4.0 and MySQL.pdf

I had a great time at the conference, met a lot of nice folks, friends, customers, partners and colleagues. After the conference I was unable to get back home like so many of you because of the Paul Simon singing Eyjafjallajökul volcano in Iceland.

So I ended up flying over to Orlando for a week of brutal PDI 4.0 RC1 hacking with the rest of the l33t super Pentaho development team.  However, after 2+ weeks from home, even a severe storm …

The White House contributes to OSS. Growth for Pentaho and MuleSoft. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# The White House released some of the custom code it has developed for whitehouse.gov as open source.

# Pentaho reported 229% bookings growth and 177% Enterprise Edition customer growth in Q2.

# MuleSoft grew bookings by 140% in Q1.

# The beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is now available, without Xen.

…

While working on a transformation I ran into a problem with comparing two (seemingly) identical numbers using the Filter Rows step. I had a case where a transformation selected two DECIMAL(13,5) values from the database and compared them.

I could see that the numbers were identical in the MySQL database, but the Filter Rows step returned false when comparing. To troubleshoot, I tried multiplying the difference of the two numbers by 10,000,000 ( in the transform) and I actually discovered a very small difference beyond the 5th decimal place. This datatype in MySQL is considered an "exact" datatype, not to be confused with a FLOAT.

My solution is to convert the two fields to Strings and do the comparison. If you don't like that, then explicitly round the numbers using the Calculator step. The Select and Alter step, doesn't seem to truncate the numbers and I don't think it was intended to alter the raw data anyway.
…

Dear Kettle and MySQL fans,

Next week I’ll be strolling around the MySQL user conference in Santa Clara.  Even better, I’ll be presenting Tuesday afternoon (3:05pm).  The topic is Pentaho Data Integration 4.0 and MySQL.

The presentation will show you what the world’s most popular open source data integration tool can do for a MySQL user.  It will include practical examples and will showcase the latest improvements present in the brand new version 4.0.

Even more than the presentation itself, I’m looking forward to meeting you all over there.  The regular crowd, MySQL users, Pentaho partners, folks from …

 
 I'm an advisor, investor and board member to several startup software companies including Revolution Computing, Pentaho and most recently Erply a new Software as a Service (SaaS) company.  One of the common threads I look for is the opportunity to disrupt a large market.

One of the things that made MySQL successful was its use of open source technology to disrupt the multi-billion dollar database market.  In Silicon …

Marten Mickos joins Eucalyptus. Novell rejects Elliot. Perspectives on OSBC. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Mårten Mickos was named CEO of Eucalyptus Systems.

# Novell’s board rejected Elliot’s takeover proposal as inadequate, will review other alternatives.

# North Bridge Venture Partners published the results of its Future of Open Source survey.

# Rob Bearden was appointed executive chairman of the board of Pentaho.

# The Eclipse Foundation …

Last year, at about this time of the year, I was well involved in the process of writing the book Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL" for Wiley. To date, "Pentaho Solutions" is still the only all-round book on the open source Pentaho Business Intelligence suite.

It was an extremely interesting project to participate in, full of new experiences. Although the act of writing was time consuming and at times very trying for me as well as my family, it was completely worth it. I have none but happy memories of the collaboration with my full …