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How to build a PowerPivot Competency Center

Why isn't data modeling part of agile development?

The draw of the open source R statistics environment, according to vendors, is cost -- it's simply cheaper than premium offerings.

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I was watching the original Toy Story movie with my kids the other day.  Even watching it today, it’s a surprising movie that still stands up after 15 years.  For the uninitiated, the movie revolves around the misadventures of a toy cowboy named Woody.  In the movie, Woody escapes with Buzz Lightyear from the clutches of Sid, a twisted neighborhood kid who tortures toys in various ways.  All of this is in an attempt to return home, so Woody and Buzz won’t get left behind when their owner moves.

One of the pivotal scenes is when Woody is in Sid’s lair, where he is surrounded by some of Sid’s twisted creations: the head of a pterodactyl on a doll’s body, the body of a strong man and the head of a duck.  You get the jist.  Woody discovers that these “mash ups” are actually friendly, and can help, even though they are an unnatural combination.

With this in mind, below is a quick little combination of Pentaho and Jaspersoft, where Jaspersoft Reports are called from within the Pentaho User Console.  This is admittedly not exactly rocket science, but should spark some thinking of where these disparate platforms can go when they are used collaboratively.

The basic steps to make something like this happen are:

• Make sure you have a working Pentaho server and a Jasperserver installed.
• Then, deploy the jasperserver webapp under the pentaho server’s webapps path to allow the jasperserver to ride along with Pentaho’s Tomcat server.
• Next, within a pentaho solution folder of your choice.  Add a *.url file to the solution that calls the Jasperreport of your choice.  For the URL, add the decorate and jasperserver login parameters like this:

• http://localhost:8080/jasperserver/flow.html?_flowId=viewReportFlow&reportUnit=/organizations/organization_1/StandardReports/ExampleMultiAxis&decorate=no&j_username=superuser&j_password=superuser

• And there you go:

 

 

Yes, there are some limitations here.  It’s passing the plain text user information, and there is no common user model, and sessions are independent.  It also adds some administrative complexity because you now have two different flavors of reporting under the hood, including separate database connections, etc.  There are certainly sexier levels of integration with the jar files/class libraries possible. 

But, simple integration like this can be a quick way to add certain capabilities across platforms, and speaks to the overall coolness that is open source BI.  Yes, you can take the head of a pterodactyl and put it on a doll’s body and you may find that it actually is helpful, and maybe not so scary.

I’ll let you know if I get any more twisted ideas from watching Toy Story 3 this weekend.

Why is agile so important to organizations, and how does an organization get to an agile state?

Informatica Marketplace is similar to Salesforce.com's AppExchange (or Apple's App Store) -- but many unique aspects set it clearly apart.

In a recent Forbes interview Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, somewhat bashes open source: http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/14/google-yahoo-software-technology-cio-network-open-source.html

Ryan makes some good points about the benefits of a multi-tenent architecture, but I feel he’s leaving out some important details.

Did OpSource write their own operating system, servers, middleware, and databases? They would be foolish to.
Did OpSource go with expensive proprietary software for thoses pieces? Probably not, with their business model they’d want to stay away from those license fees – and the OpSource website is RedHat Linux and Apache HTTP.

If they are smart, OpSource will, like all the other SaaS companies, use open source at every opportunity they can. And somehow this is a fatal flaw for open source?

Ryan is just doing a little open source bashing because it’s the thing that scares him the most. If SaaS companies can built multi-tenent apps on an open source base, then so can open source developers. He knows this. He’s just enjoying OpSource’s window of opportunity. But he joins a list of chief executives that have banded together over the years to tell a most amusing story. Bill Gates kicks it off in 2001:

“We think of Linux as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market, but I really don’t think in the commercial market we’ll see it in any significant way.”

2001: He was saying that open source is ok for a hobby, just not for your operating system.
2003: A few years after that, as open source databases started to appear, we heard the CEOs of database companies telling us that open source is ok for your operating system, but not for your database.
2005: Then the executives of middleware companies told us that open source was fine for your operating system and databases, but not for your middleware.
2008: After that we heard application companies telling us that open source is great for your operating system, databases, and middleware, but you don’t to use an open source application.
2010: Now Ryan is telling us that open source is fine for everything including applications, just not multi-tenent applications.

These CEO’s have painted themselves into a very small corner over the years. Looks to me like Ryan is the lastest one holding the brush. The question is who, if anyone, can he pass the brush to when multi-tenent open source applications appear?

The current debate about social media in the context of BI presages its inevitable acceptance, Lyza officials argue. Five years from now, they claim, social BI will be a reality -- and Lyza 2.0 aptly demonstrates its promise.

Thanks to aggressive service enablement and the efforts of DI vendors, another integration paradigm -- call it Integration-as-a-Service -- has emerged.

Far from being a complementary or nonessential data management option, third-party data can become a competitive differentiator.

A consultant offers BI basics for executives, project managers, and developers.

We explore the difference “agile” makes in your data warehouse.

What role does BI architecture play in an agile environment?

IBMs-Past-SAPs-Future

A new report breaks the hard problem of data integration down into an easily-digestible checklist of ten DI recommended practices.

The what, who, and why behind the move to agile BI.

Officials say IBM's new MapReduce-based offering permits customers to tackle Big Data projects that involve petabytes of information.

Vertica says the latest revision of its analytic database is easier to deploy, manage, and scale.

I’ll be presenting an informal webinar tomorrow to the Pentaho community about Pentaho’s Hadoop initiative.

I’m planning to cover:

• Use cases for Hadoop and what needs Pentaho can solve
• The risks and costs of Hadoop implementations
• Architecture of Hadoop/Hive with and without Pentaho
• Pentaho’s Hadoop roadmap
• Demo of selected integration points
• Cover some FAQs

When:

June 9, 2010 10:00 am, Eastern Daylight Time (New York, GMT-04:00)
June 9, 2010 2:00 pm, (Reykjavik, GMT)
June 9, 2010 4:00 pm, Europe Summer Time (Paris, GMT+02:00)
June 10, 2010 12:00 am, Australia Eastern Standard Time (Sydney, GMT+10:00)

Where:

http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/COM/Community+Technical+WebEx

Pentaho launched their On Demand initiative today: Press Release.

While the launch is new, I know that Pentaho has already onboarded some customers in a quiet soft launch and the response has been very positive.  Why wouldn’t it be?  This offering is the best of both worlds, and makes purchasing a business department driven BI project easy.

SaaS BI’s key selling point (there are many small, nice to haves, but the thing that gets people to reach for their wallet) is the ability to get a solution with an almost total lack of IT involvement.  Throw in non cap-ex expenditures for the solution (4k USD / mo instead of a 30k license) and it’s a huge win.

Business users have their data (feeds, dumps, extracts, or connections to DBs), have the budget but then need the tools/expertise to get their BI system “up and running.”  SaaS and On Demand BI is a perfect fit for these customers - up and running quickly.  Where it breaks down, is that with a SaaS offering, once you go SaaS you can’t EVER go back.  You’re stuck with a solution built entirely upon a proprietary, vendor controlled software and infrastructure.

Recap:

Biggest draw of SaaS is quick easy startup without IT, and smaller monthly pay as you go
Biggest drawback of SaaS is lock in like you’ve never seen before.  Not just software, but operations as well.

That’s why I find the Pentaho On Demand BI initiative to hit the middle of the sweet (suite?) spot.  It is absolutely the best of both worlds.

Their On Demand offering allows

• Business sponsors to get a complete BI suite up and running quickly (72 hr challenge is wicked cool) without IT involvement (or minimal).
• Incremental, pay as you go billing.  This is huge - not sure your BI project will generate a return?  Spin up Pentaho On Demand, do the 72 hr challenge, and shop it around the demo to the users for a month or two.
• This is what knocks it out of the park though; Once you’re done with your eval/build out you have so many options whereas with pure SaaS you don’t.  Not what the users wanted? No problem: throw it away.  Is what they want?  Keep going On Demand?  On Demand not something your IT likes -> bring it On Site.  That’s right, Pentaho and their hosting partners have designed their On Demand offering to permit shutdown and transport of the machine VMWare images in house.  Even without that, just getting your Pentaho Solution you can install Pentaho locally and run it in house with your reports/cubes/dashboards.

On Demand BI won’t be for everyone - it’s still geared towards people wanting a complete suite of BI tools, and are willing to pay for a private, secure Pentaho instance in the cloud.  SaaS BI will still be better for people who actually prefer ZERO infrastructure and for those that don’t have the budget for a private infrastructure (if you have $100 / mo for BI, this isn’t right for you).

Great news for “frustrated with IT but still wanting to build out a real, long term BI solution” analysts everywhere.