December 12th, 2008 admin
After looking for some code in one of my many “backup” directories i came across a .rar called college_work. After extracting its contents i was plunged back six years to the days of my multimedia design classes. One of my projects i was very proud of at the time was a simple game based on one of my favourite book series. And here it is for the first time for you to enjoy! (if it still works…)
Posted in random | No Comments »
August 31st, 2008 admin
I decided to post a sample (test) of my first Pentaho Reporting Video Tutorials. At the moment this example has no sound and isn’t really a tutorial as such but more of a “Look what you can do with Pentaho Report Designer”.
Hopefully in the coming days i will figure out how to record sound with my tutorials and then i can really get down to business (its too hard to follow a tutorial when there is no one explaining what and why they are doing).
Anyhow, you can download a copy of this tutorial here: example2.ogg
As always, feedback is appreciated and if you have and tips about recording the desktop WITH sound on Kubuntu then im all ears!!
It might also be worth noting that this video is in .ogg format. If you are on windows i would recommend downloading a copy of VLC. This will allow you to play the video.
Harris
Posted in Reporting | No Comments »
August 19th, 2008 admin
So you might have noticed the website has been down for the last couple of days? This was due to me changing my hosting provider and having a hard time getting it all moved across (silly .htaccess files…..).
Anyhow, In the next couple of days I intend to start creating video tutorials for PRD (Pentaho Report Designer) to help answer some of the basic questions we get alot of the time in ##pentaho. My question to you is, what do you want to know? Should we start from the basics and just work our way up or do you have suggestions for tutorials you want to see.
Let me know!
Harris
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July 19th, 2008 admin
A couple of days ago an individual on ##pentaho wanted to run a single kettle transformation against multiple databases on multiple database servers. After a little work we figured how to do it and this i would like to share with you.
What if you had a setup where you had many database servers running the same database at different locations with different user access credentials and you wanted to get all this data into the one place?
You could create a transformation that works for one database server using a static host, username and password and such then copy that transformation for as many database servers you have, changing the access credentials for each transformation. This would create a maintenance nightmare!
Instead, we are going to create a Kettle job that will loop our transformation and replace the host, username and password with a variable from an XML document for each database server.
To save time I have created a sample of these Kettle transformations / jobs that work with the Pentaho Sample data and attached them to this post for you to examine for yourself.
Please note that you will have to edit the db_connections.xml file to fit your database connection details for the Pentaho sampleData. Its also worth mentioning that the transformation get_database_data.ktr assumes that the sampleData is stored in a MySQL database. If this is not the case you will have to change this too.
Lets briefly go over whats happening in these Kettle jobs, sub jobs and transformations in the order they are executed.
The sample should contain six files. Two jobs, three transformations and an XML document.
db_connections.xml
This XML document contains all the connection credentials for each individual database server. For this example you can see that i have specified the same database server twice but in a real life example you would list ALL your database servers credentials here.
Main.kjb
This is the Main job that will execute all the sub jobs and transformations. It is our starting point. This job will run a transformation called get_db_connection_information.ktr and then run the sub job called sub_job.ktr
get_db_connection_information.ktr
This transformation will read our db_connections.xml document and pass the resulting data back to the stream.
sub_job.kjb
Now this sub job will loop for every set of connection details we get from the XML document thus running the set_enviroment_variables.ktr and get_database_data.ktr multiple times.
set_enviroemt_variables.ktr
This will take the first et of database credentials from the XML document and set them as variables.
get_database_data.ktr
And finally this transformation will use a table input step and the recently set variables for the connection information. This transformation will run and get one row of data rom the first database and output this into a text document.
So to sum up the whole job will take the two database connections from the xml document and loop the sub job twice thus outputting a text document with two rows of data (one rom for each time the get_database_data.ktr is run).
Hopefully this has made sense and someone will benefit from it.
Harris
Posted in ETL | No Comments »
July 16th, 2008 admin
Here’s a little CDF tip for your chart components.
There are times you cannot decide what sort of chart type you should use to display your data (Unless of course you have read any of the books from Steven Few. In that case you should know) so why not give the end user the ability to choose the chart type THEY want?
Well now you can!
Using the CDF and a couple of xactions we can generate a selector (either radio buttons or a pull down) that allows the user to change the chart type. To accomplish this we have to define an xaction that contains each one of the chart definitions and then pass the selected argument to the xaction and use it with a IF statement. If this doesn’t make much sense they do not fear. You can download a sample I created earlier today and see for yourself.
Any questions? Bugs? Let me know!
Harris
Posted in Dashboards | 2 Comments »
July 16th, 2008 admin
Presenting for all you happy-go-lucky Penatho folks out there, the recreation of the penatho_sample dashboard for the CDF v2.0 (Community Dashboard Framework).
Download your copy - pentaho_sample.tar.gz
Any questions or bugs then feel free to let me know.
Harris
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July 10th, 2008 admin
If you are up to date with the Pentaho community and Pentaho Dashboard Development then you may have heard of the “Community Dashboard Frameword” (CDF) created by Ingo Klose and Pedro Alves.
This Dashboard Framework simplifies the dashboard creation process. Instead of having to create you own .jsp for dashboards you can now define them with simple JavaScript and HTML (and the xaction components of course).
Since the release of the CDF I have been creating all sorts of very functional dashboards and even recreated some on the Pentaho samples to share with you.
The first Dashboard I have recreated for the CDF is the one you would usually see right after you log into the platform. This dashboard is usually defined in Home.jsp as found in your webapps/pentaho/jsp folder.
Download the home_dashboard.tar.gz and extract it into your pentaho-solutions/dashboards/ directory.
If everything works okay then you should be able to open a new dashboard in the CDF called home_dashboard. This dashboard is an exact copy in functionality to the home.jsp dashboard. The only differences are…
It might also be wirth mentioning that there is a custom Javascript function included in the template.html to overcome a functionality issue but you can find out about this in the comments.
Any questions? Dashboard requests? Comment here or join me (and others) on the ##pentaho IRC channel on irc.freenode.net
Thanks to Pedro for his support in creating this dashboard.
More to come!
Harris
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May 31st, 2008 admin
Ive decided to move away from Drupal in favour of Wordpress. Drupal has some great features for sure and I will continue to use it for my other websites but as far as blogging goes… Wordpress looks like the better option.
Posted in News | 1 Comment »