Mondrian in Action Update
Posted: March 3, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: book, Mondrian, pentaho Leave a comment »It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a year since we announced that a book on Mondrian was in the works. But were finally getting to the point where it feels like it’s almost finished. We are getting ready to go into the final series of chapter reviews (11 total).
It’s still going to be a few more months as we finish up the appendices and indexes and update based on reviews and then the production guys make it look nice and finished. We also know that by the time the book is published some pretty big things are likely to have happened in the Mondrian technology sphere, like 4.0 actually being released and Pentaho 5.0 hopefully being released as well. But that’s the drawback to technical books. (It gives me interesting stuff to blog about.)
On the whole, I’m very happy with what we’ve put together. We’ve managed to put a lot of information into the book. So much so that we’re now looking for ways to trim back to get within our allotted page count. This book will be a great one to give to anyone who wants to learn about Mondrian and doesn’t want to visit a whole bunch of different sites and blogs. I hope you enjoy it and find it useful.
Using the AnalyzerBusinessGroup annotation in Pentaho Analyzer
Posted: February 2, 2013 Filed under: Analytics, Analyzer, Mondrian, Tips | Tags: Annotation, pentaho Leave a comment »A quiet, maybe too quiet, new feature of Analyzer in Pentaho 4.8 was the addition of the AnalyzerBusinessGroup annotation. This annotation will let you specify that a measure should go into a specific group rather than be lumped in with a bunch of measures. If you have just a few measures, it’s not that big a deal. But many users have a lot of measures that can be categorized and it would be nicer to have them in separate groups. I have not tried this with dimensions, but if you define them correctly it seems that it would be overkill. I also suspect that Mondrian 4′s Measure Groups will make this obsolete, but don’t know that for a fact.
Using the feature is very simple. Just add an annotation to the measure and specify the AnalyzerBusinessGroup. For example:
<Annotation name=”AnalyzerBusinessGroup”>Orders</Annotation>
and
<Annotation name=”AnalyzerBusinessGroup”>Prices</Annotation>
results in the following (using the Steel Wheels example):
Getting the PostgreSQL installer out of quarantine on OS X Mountain Lion
Posted: January 15, 2013 Filed under: Business Intelligence | Tags: pentaho, postgresql Leave a comment »In a noble attempt to start playing around with Pentaho 5.0 (aka Sugar), I downloaded the CI version and PostgreSQL, since it’s replaced MySQL as of 4.8 as the default database for the repository. After dutifully reading the README file and changing some shared memory settings (don’t skip this step), rebooting, and remounting the install image, I kicked off the install app. Nothing. No message, no popup, NOTHING. Except for a not so helpful message in the Console that indicated one of the install files was in quarantine because of TextEdit.
After a bit of searching, I found a helpful site that told me how to turn off quarantine (search for “quarantine”). It turns out there is a handy bash command to turn off the quarantine. ”$ xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine <file-name>”. The ‘-r’ recurses if this is a file. So, I cd’d to the /Volumes/PostgreSQL 9.2.2-1 and ran “$ xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine postgresql-9.2.2-1-osx.app” since a .app file is really a directory. And …. it failed because it’s a mounted disk without write permissions.
That should have been obvious to me, but it’s late. So I copied the .app file to ~/Downloads and ran the command again. After a quick return I ran the install app with no further problems.
Now to do all the cool stuff I had originally planned before getting sidetracked.
Mondrian in Action Discount!
Posted: October 31, 2012 Filed under: Analytics, Business Intelligence, Mondrian, Uncategorized Leave a comment »What’s better than getting an early release copy of Mondrian in Action? How about getting it for 1/2 off! All the same Mondrian goodness by for only half the price. Just hop over to the Manning site and and use the discount code dotd1101au.
Hurry, though. This code is only good on November 1st from 12am to 11:59pm EDT.
And while you’re at it, go see what Julian Hyde, author of Mondrian and co-author of Mondrian in Action has to say.
Remember – 50% off November 1st only with code dotd1101au.
Mondrian in Action – Early Access Edition Now Available
Posted: October 25, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »It’s official! Mondrian in Action is now available as an Early Access Edition from Manning press. You can order it on the book’s manning page and the first three chapters are available. I can tell you that about half of the others are really close as well.
Changing the JVM Memory Settings for Pentaho Design Tools on OS X
Posted: October 8, 2012 Filed under: Business Intelligence, Design Tools | Tags: Design Tools, Java Virtual Machine, JVM, pentaho Leave a comment »Background
Pentaho ships a number of design tools, such as Pentaho Report Designer, Pentaho Data Integration, and others for Linux, Windows, and OS X. While the apps appear to be native, they are Java applications that have been wrapped to run in the native environment.
One of the key settings that users often want to change are the JVM memory settings. These settings indicate how much memory a process should start with and, more importantly, the maximum amount it should use. If you allocate too little then it’s possible to get OutOfMemory exceptions and the application stops functioning. This post will show you how to modify the settings.
Finding the File to Modify
The file we want to modify is called Info.plist. This file contains settings for the application that is being executed and is a standard file in an OS X application. OS X bundles applications into an Application bundle with an extension of .app. This is really a directory, but FInder and other tools make it appear as if it’s a single file.
There are two ways to get access to the file. The first is to use Finder. Find the application file in the design-tools and sub-folders under Pentaho or wherever you installed them. The application will show up as a single file. Now right-click on the file and select “Show Package Contents”. This will open a new view in Finder with all of the contents of the file.
Once you are viewing the contents of the package, select the Contents folder and you should see the Info.plist file. This is an XML file, so you can edit with any text editor. If you double-click it will attempt to use XCode if you have it installed. I recommend using a different text editor, such as TextMate or textedit.
Right click on the Info.plist file and select Open With… and then choose the editor of your choice. You may have to select Other… and then choose the app if the one you want isn’t displayed. The file should open up in your text editor.
The alternative to Finder, is to use the Terminal. This is my preferred approach, but it should only be used by those who are comfortable working from the command line. You will need a text editor that you are also comfortable using, such as vi or emacs. I personally prefer vi.
Navigate to the same folder. The Terminal doesn’t treat the .app file as anything other than a folder, so basic usage of the cd command is enough. Once you are in the proper directory, edit the file.
Changing the File
Now that you have the file open in an editor, you can make the needed change. Near the bottom of the file you should find a declaration similar to the following:
<key>VMOptions</key>
<string> -Xms512m -Xmx1024m</string>
These are the settings that will get passed to the JVM when the application starts. The -Xms setting is the amount of memory used on started. The -Xmx is the maximum amount to use before errors start happening. In this example I have 512MB on startup and a maximum of 1024MB (1GB) of memory maximum. Note that these are increase from the default that I started with.
It’s customary to specify the memory in megabytes, using the 256m where m is megabytes. It is also customary, although not required, to have the memory e in exponentials of 2, e.g. 256, 512, 1024, etc. The mx value should always be larger than the ms value. I personally make it twice as large.
Once you’ve set the values you want, save the file and then restart the application if it is running. Assuming you increased the values, you should now have more memory.
Using MongoDB with Community Data Access (CDA)
Posted: October 4, 2012 Filed under: Business Intelligence, Dashboards, MongoDB | Tags: CDA, CDF, MongoDB, pentaho Leave a comment »I’ve covered how to get data directly from MongoDB directly into Pentaho Reports. But what if you want to get them in a dashboard built with Community Dashboard Framework (CDF)? That’s actually about as simple as getting it into a Pentaho report.
CDF comes with a related technology known as Community Data Access (CDA). In general, CDA is a technology that abstracts access to data and provides a consistent approach to data access for CDF dashboards. Among it’s other nice features are that it supports a wide variety of data sources including scripting. Currently the scripting data source only supports Beanshell, but that’s good enough for communicating with MongoDB.
I’ve used the same database and collection from the reporting example, so you can find the source there. I won’t go into all of the details of the CDA since you can find those at the WebDetails site. The significant pieces are that you need to have a Connection of type “scripting.scripting” and then a DataAccess of type “scripting”. As you can see, the query script is essentially the same as the one for reporting except that it’s in the Beanshell syntax.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<CDADescriptor>
<DataSources>
<Connection id="mongodb" type="scripting.scripting">
<Language>beanshell</Language>
<InitScript/>
</Connection>
</DataSources>
<DataAccess access="public" cache="true" cacheDuration="3600" connection="mongodb" id="mongodb-sales" type="scriptable">
<Name>Sales via MongoDB</Name>
<Columns/>
<Parameters/>
<Query><![CDATA[
import com.mongodb.*;
import org.pentaho.reporting.engine.classic.core.util.TypedTableModel;
Mongo mongo = new Mongo();
db = mongo.getDB("pentaho");
sales = db.getCollection("sales");
String [] columnNames = {"Region", "Year", "Q1", "Q2", "Q3", "Q4"};
Class[] columnTypes = {String.class, Integer.class, Integer.class, Integer.class, Integer.class, Integer.class};
TypedTableModel model = new TypedTableModel(columnNames, columnTypes);
docs= sales.find();
while (docs.hasNext()) {
doc = docs.next();
model.addRow(new Object[] { doc.get("region"), doc.get("year"), doc.get("q1"), doc.get("q2"), doc.get("q3"), doc.get("q4")});
}
docs.close();
return model;
]]></Query>
</DataAccess>
</CDADescriptor>
Now that the CDA data access has been defined you can use the CDA previewer to view the results. Assuming you’ve used the same data you should see something similar to the following:
Example of the data from MongoDB via CDA.
At this point the data is available for any dashboard that has permission to access the data.
