It has been a while since I posted on my blog - in fact, I believe this is the first time ever that more than one month passed between posts since I started blogging. There are a couple of reasons for the lag:

• 
  
• Matt Casters, Jos van Dongen and me have spent a lot of time finalizing our forthcoming book, Pentaho Kettle Solutions (Wiley, ISBN: 978-0-470-63517-9). The book is currently being produced, and should be available according to schedule in early September 2010. If you're interested, you might like to read …

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 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 …

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 …

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 …

Dear Kettle fans,

Daniel & I had a lot of fun in Orlando last week. Among other things we worked on the User Defined Java Class (UDJC) step.  If you have a bit of Java Experience, this step allows you to quickly write your own plugin in a step. This step is available in recent builds of Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) version 4.

Now, how does this work?  Well, let’s take Roland Bouman’s example : the calculation of the the date of Easter.  In this blog post, Roland explains how to calculate Easter in MySQL and Kettle using JavaScript.  OK, so what if you want this calculation to be really fast in Kettle?  Well, then you can turn to pure Java to do the job…

To whom it may concern,
A MySQL stored function to calculate easter day
I uploaded a MySQL forge snippet for the f_easter() function. You can use this function in MySQL statements to calculate easter sunday for any given year:

mysql>  select f_easter(year(now()));
+-----------------------+
| f_easter(year(now())) |
+-----------------------+
| 2010-04-04            |
+-----------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Anonymous Gregorian algorithm
To implement it, I simply transcribed the code of the "Anonymous Gregorian algorithm" from wikipedia's Computus article.

You might ask yourself: "how does …

Yes!

Finally, it's there: In a few hours, I will be flying off to San Franscisco to attend OSCON 2009 in San Jose, California. This is the first time I'm attending, and I'm tremendously excited to be there! The sessions look very promising, and I'm looking forward to seeing some excellent speakers. I expect to learn a lot.

I'm also very proud and feel honoured to have the chance to deliver a session myself. It's called Taming Your Data: Practical Data Integration Solutions with Kettle.

Unsurprisingly, I will be talkig a lot about Kettle, a.k.a. Pentaho Data Integration. Recently, I talked about Kettle too at the …

Hi!

Yesterday I had the honour of presenting my mini-bi/datawarehousing tutorial "Starring Sakila" for MySQL University. I did a modified version of the presentation I did together with Matt Casters at the MySQL user's conference 2009. The structure of the presentation is still largely the same, although I condensed various bits, and I added practical examples of setting up the ETL process and creating a Pentaho Analysis View (OLAP pivot table) on top of a Mondrian Cube.

The slides, session recording, and materials such as SQL script, pentaho data integration jobs and transformations, and Sakila Rentals Cube for Mondrian are all available here on MySQL Forge.
Copyright Notice
Presentation slides, and …

For some reason, the creation of a mapping to a database table poses a problem for certain people.

This is how it’s done in PDI 3.2.0 or later in the “Table Output” step:

Ogg video available over here

Until next time,
Matt