This week Pentaho released version 2.0 of its BI Suite, and it contains two major features that the mondrian community will love.

First, the Pentaho User Console, a web-based environment where end users can create, view, save, and share BI content. Content is arranged into folders, and includes operational reports created with Pentaho Reports, and dimensional analytics created with Pentaho Analysis (mondrian). Users can also create subscriptions to receive reports regularly by email. PUC is simple and elegant. I predict that it will quickly become the face of Pentaho for end users.


Second, the Pentaho Aggregate Designer, which automatically creates a set of aggregate tables to accelerate a mondrian schema. I believe that …

Yesterday, we concluded our third annual “MySQL Kundenkonferenz” in Munich. We had a record number [1] of participants, 255 on the re-count including hosts. I had the pleasure to deliver the welcome speech and to moderate the event. Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed the day and it was my distinct impression that the expectations of the participants were more than met.

The external setting of the conference was Hilton Munich City on Rosenheimerstraße, close to Munich’s culture centre Gasteig — and just one S-Bahn stop away from home for me. Excellent facilities.

The start was delayed slightly due to our high-latency registration process, which prompts us to go …

Yesterday I visited the MySQL Customer Conference in Munich, as I did last year. The agenda was quite similar to last year's agenda, but I was really surprised how much Sun hardware and software products were integrated (forced?) into most of the not so technical talks.

All in all the conference was okay, but not as good as last year.

Yesterday I visited the MySQL Customer Conference in Munich, as I did last year. The agenda was quite similar to last year's agenda, but I was really surprised how much Sun hardware and software products were integrated (forced?) into most of the not so technical talks.

All in all the conference was okay, but not as good as last year.

It's been about a week since the initial launch of the first 5.0 packages and the OurDelta website, so it's time for some first impressions and an update on what's going on right now...

• 
  
• Immediately lots of hits on the site (from 67 distinct countries), most downloads and repo retrieves started happening a few days later.
  
• Interest spiked even more when we put up the Debian 4.0 (Etch) packages, apparently there was serious pent-up demand there!
  
• Lots of positive responses from clients, user groups, global MySQL community, and in fact also from within Sun/MySQL. That's very nice, as it provides confirmation we're doing something worthwhile!
  
• No negative responses, blog posts or articles that I know of (and yes I did search around a bit through Google, …

It’s been about a week since the initial launch of the first 5.0 packages and the OurDelta website, so it’s time for some first impressions and an update on what’s going on right now…

• Immediately lots of hits on the site (from 67 distinct countries), most downloads and repo retrieves started happening a few days later.
• Interest spiked even more when we put up the Debian 4.0 (Etch) packages, apparently there was serious pent-up demand there!
• Lots of positive responses from clients, user groups, global MySQL community, and in fact also from within Sun/MySQL. That’s very nice, as it provides confirmation we’re doing something worthwhile!
• No negative responses, blog posts or articles that I know of (and yes I did search around a bit through Google, Technorati, etc) which is of …

Today we released version 3.0 of Zmanda Recovery Manger for MySQL. Here are the highlights of the release.

The new version of ZRM supports Zmanda Management Console (ZMC) running on 32- and 64-bit Ubuntu and Debian. We received quite a few requests for providing such support in the past.

In addition to Linux and Solaris, the ZRM server can now run on Windows. We supported logical and VSS-based backup for MySQL on Windows for a long time, but sometimes it was a challenge to introduce ZRM running on Linux/Solaris to all-Windows shops. Based on feedback from customers, prospects and from our partner MySQL, we have developed the version of ZRM that can protect MySQL in all-Windows environments.

We expanded the number of supported snapshot technologies by adding EMC CLARiiON SnapView to the list. This mid-range storage array is a staple for many data …

That's always been my M.O., I guess, but last week was pretty busy:

Flyway

I went down to the Flyway Film Festival in Pepin, Wisconsin over the weekend to screen "Cottonwood", a short film I directed over the summer as part of the 48 Hour Film Project.

I gave a brief Q&A about the making of the film, then did some schmoozing at the filmmaker's reception. I had a great chat with the director of "Redneck Zombies"--the guy was hilarious.

"Cottonwood" is five minutes long--six with credits--and was written, shot, edited and scored in exactly forty-eight hours. And although "Cottonwood" looks like a film that was made in an absolute, …

"Why Falcon Doesn't Work Anymore"

Recap: After the MySQL Dev meeting in Riga, Philip "Troublemaker" Stoev, reported a serious problem with Falcon recovery. Ann suspected that the problem not a true recovery bug, which Jim confirmed.

The problem wasn't that we found a bug. The problem was that we didn't.

Run-up to Riga

The Falcon team was really rockin' in the last half of August and early September. With the Dev meeting looming, all changes for the 6.0.7 alpha had to be pushed by month's end, otherwise we'd lose weeks of QA testing.

Lots …

Have you ever heard about VoiceXML? It's a W3C standart that allows you to build web pages that are accessed by voice! It's very used for services like travel tickets selling, hotel reservation, bank account information and so on. In this post, we'll give you a general view of how to make a basic hotel reservation
application with VoiceXML and how to run it using Glassfish and MySQL.

First of all, for VoiceXML applications, we need a voice gateway. We used the Voxeo, it's free and provides you with phone numbers that you can call for free using Skype. All you need to do is create a free account in Voxeo and register your application by informing it's URL. After registering you'll receive the unique phone number for your application.

We'll assume you already know the basics of VoiceXML syntax for the …