Yes!

Last night, I completed the draft of "Pentaho Solutions", which is a book I'm writing together with my friend and colleague Jos van Dongen for Wiley.

(Actually, the full title is: "Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL")

Here's an overview of the contents, just to give you an idea what we have been doing:

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• Part I: Getting Started, Prerequisites, Installation and Configuration and Overview
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  • Chapter 1: Quick Start: Pentaho PCI Examples
    
  • Chapter 2: Prerequisites
    
  • Chapter 3: Server Installation and Configuration
    
  • Chapter 4: The Pentaho …

Jos, my co-author for the "Building Pentaho Solutions" book just pointed me to a recent article by Jeff Prenevost entitled "The Problem with History".AbstractJeff's topic, loading a hybrid Type 1 / Type 2 slowly changing dimension table is related to data warehousing but maybe of interest outside of that context as well.

As it turns out, the particular problem described by Jeff is non-trivial, but can be solved quite elegantly in a single SQL statment. This may be a compelling alternative to the multi-step, …

Quick tip - suppose you need the result set of a MySQL stored procedure in your Pentaho Data Integration (a.k.a. Kettle) Transformation, what do you do?

A Call DB Procedure sounds promising, but as it turns out, you can't use it to retrieve any result sets. Rather, this type of step is meant have an input stream from another source:

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• drive stored procedure execution presumably for some useful side-effect
  
• invoke a database stored function and obtain the scalar result
  

So, what can we do? The answer is simpler than might be expected.

Just use an ordinary …

Ok - this has been stewing for some time now, and I think now is the right time to announce that I am working together with Jos van Dongen from Tholis Consulting to create a book for Wiley with the tentative title "Building Pentaho Solutions".

My personal aim is to make this book the primary point of reference for DBAs and Application Developers that are familiar with Open Source products like MySQL and PostgreSQL but have no prior BI skills, as well as BI professionals that are familiar with closed source BI products like Microsoft BI and Business Objects that want to learn how to get things done with Pentaho.

The book will cover all distinct components and sub-products that make up the …