Will Gorman from Pentaho graciously presented on Pentaho’s OLAP Solution (Mondrian) and I presented on MicroStrategy’s equivalent (Intelligent Cubes).

Another worthy note is that we had a announcements for job postings…

Companies present at meet (and recruiters) were looking for one of each:
- Informatica Developer
- MicroStrategy Developer
- Senior BI Developer
- Junior QA/Java Developer

It seems to be a great time to be working in IT in good O-Town. If you want to find out about our next meetings, jpb opportunities and networking, check us out at our CFBI Page and become a member.

I’m pretty excited to present on MicroStrategy along with Will Gorman on Pentaho’s side. This cannot be anything but very exciting, see you there.

We will host our fourth meeting at DeVry University July 18th, 7-9 p.m.  (across from the Millenia Mall)

Location Address:
4000 Millenia Boulevard
Orlando, FL 32839
407 355 3131

For updated information, go to the CFBI page at linkedIn.

Notice how the few first and the few lasts panels would apply to any installer we wanted to create. It wouldn’t be too difficult to create a ‘base’ installer out of this one for future projects

 

Welcome Panel

Greeting - Welcome to this Pentaho installer.
Disclaimer - This installer is not affiliated with Pentaho. Where applicable, permissions has been granted to the use of any assets not created in project.
Pre-requisites - For this install to be successful, the following items are needed:
Zip(s) of Pentaho software
Available database server if not choosing Derby
About the author - Mario Talavera is a software developer in the Central Florida. Perpetually worried about technology leaving him behind, he constantly fiddles with the parts he understands in the hopes of staying hire-able.
Typical of IT, he keeps an occasional blog at http://mtalavera.wordpress.com

Pre-Requisites Panel

This installer ‘configures’ Pentaho for you. It needs you to supply the compressed sources from the Pentaho website.

Pentaho – Before continuing, ensure that you have the distributable for both Pentaho’s Business Intelligence Server (biserver-ce-3.0.8-stable.zip) as of writing this and Pentaho Data Integration – Kettle (pdi-ce-4.1.0-stable.gz).
You can grab both from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/files/Business%20Intelligence%20Server/3.8.0-stable/

Database - Out of the box, Pentaho is configured to run against an included Derby database. Alternatively, this installer will configure Pentaho to run against a MySQL database. Other databases are supported and will get added as time allows.

You can grab MySQL at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/

Product Zip Panel

Indicate the location of both product distributable(s)
INPUT

1. Location (directory) of product zips

ACTION

1. Expand zip to temp location
2. Check expanded for validity/version, etc.

Zip Check Version Panel

This screen will provide results of compressed files check done on previous screen. It will attempt to assert the expected files were provided. These checks may need to be revised as new versions of the products come out.

If zip(s) are not valid

1. Provide URL reminder and indication that installer may have not been tested with zip provided. Instruct user to get a supported version. Encourage user to email developer with issue so that this version can be validated.
2. Allow installer to proceed with cautionary notice stating that it may not work as intended. Please email developer again.

Installation Location Panel

INPUT

1. Location where Pentaho should be installed

ACTION

1. Create desired directory structure
2. Copy from temporary to newly created directory structure
3. Apply appropriate permissions

Database Selection Panel

INPUT

1. Radio button of db to use. (MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Derby)

NOTE
Derby is default selection and all but MySQL will be inactive initially. More databases could be supported as time allows for me to refine.

MySQL Credentials Panel (if MySQL was selected)

INPUT

1. Hostname/ IPAddress
2. Port number
3. Username
4. Password

Action

1. Check connect?!

Explanation of Installer Duties Panel

The following things may/will need to be explained here:

1. Actions that will take place
2. c3p0 connection pooling
3. JDBC security

Installation Duties (not a panel)

The good stuff happens here

ACTION

1. Create databases from scripts for Hibernate
2. Create databases from scripts for Quartz
3. Revise configuration files so Pentaho knows about these databases just created
4. Revise configuration files to remove settings for Derby
5. Revise configuration files to configure Spring Security for JDBC
6. Load a sample data warehouse database?!
7. Update Hibernate DB to point to DW database just created.
8. Revise Start and stop Scrips to remove Derby
9. Setup Publisher’s Password

Finish/Summary Panel

ACTION

Load (or provide url link to) Pentaho Admin
Provide startup info, completion Message

End of Panels

That’s all I can think of.  Depending on the purpose of our installer, some of these panels could be omitted but for that sake of completeness, I am keeping them for now.

For the next post, I may go over setting up the IzPack Project in Eclipse.  After our project is properly setup, we can circle back to going over all the panels in this post in as much detail as needed.  Its gonna be a hoot!

Manually installing both the Pentaho Server and Kettle is not difficult or tedious. This installer just makes installation more convenient. I am in on way affiliated to either IzPack or Pentaho, just like both products a lot.

For the first post in this series, I am going to define each screen needed for the installer to gather all necessary information and perform each task I believe is needed.

Lastly, want to learn more about the technologies involved? Go http://izpack.org/ and http://www.pentaho.com/ for way better information than you’ll find here.

Next post coming shortly!

We plant to have our second meeting at DeVry University May 19th, 7-9 p.m.  (across from the Millenia Mall)

Location Address:
4000 Millenia Boulevard
Orlando, FL 32839
407 355 3131

Agenda:
Announcements and introductions.
Hadoop Talk by Jordan Ganoff.

For updated information, go to the CFBI page at linkedIn.

Hope to see you there.

Turnout was about 16 people. Pentaho graciously provided a location, food and drinks. Ideas flowed for a few hours. We have a list of topics of interest, are seeking presenters and sponsors and intend to meet on a monthly basis for all sorts of fun.

We decided to join forces and create the Central Florida Business Intelligence (CFBI) Group. We will be keeping all electronic communication at LinkedIn so please join if you are not a member yet. Its free of course.

I will keep this list open for a bit hoping to guide people there until traffic here dies down at which point I’ll close it.

Thanks for all who showed up and shared your time; hope to see you next time!

We plan on meeting at Pentaho Headquarters Monday, April 18th at 6PM.

It will be an informal, meet and greet, in the hopes of getting a local BI community going.  Doing Analytics,BI and related nowadays, I’ve struggled a bit finding peers in Orlando to share information with.  Hopefully, there is a silent majority of BI people in Orlando wanting to meet.  Neat stuff.

Meeting Details
Date: Monday, April 18th
Time: 6:00 P.M.
Location:
Pentaho Corporate Office
Citadel International, Suite 340
5950 Hazeltine National Dr.Orlando, FL 32822, USA

Pentaho User Group – Orlando at LinkedIn

Orlando BI Google Group (think email list)

Feel free to make contact on either one; hope to see you there!

You, like me, may have Bug 312038 – JRE Container hasChildren locks up the UI for more than 30s.

For me, starting Eclipse or building was taking minutes at times… something you can quietly hide until you have peers reviewing code behind your back and impatiently point out that you suck. These symptoms happened across all subsequent installations of Eclipse I tried so there was no saving me.

In the end, I followed Paul Austin’s directions on Comment 8 which I here steal:

Paul Austin says:

I have found out what the problem is. The code which is looking for src.jar and
src.zip is not finding the file as eclipse is looking in the following
directory.

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home

But the src.jar is in the new location.

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0_22-b04-307.jdk/Contents/Home/src.jar

I copied the src.jar file into the old location and now it works.

I found this out as it was also hanging when I went into the Preferences to
look at the installed JRE’s and it was hanging there. I then did a thread dump
and looked for the source code which told me it was looking for the src.jar or
src.zip file.

I have been happily humming along for days now. Worth a post indeed, I can barely wait for the next peer review to show off my smoking rejuvenated Eclipse!

IzPack has a very active online community where people with different experience levels contribute. Even the project owner, Julien Ponge, is quick to lend a helping hand.

Besides it being free to use and redistribute, one of the most attractive features is the ability to write once and run anywhere (really). I recently had to research creating an installer at work for both Windows and Linux and IzPack proved itself beating all other alternatives.

IzPack has many other features which would prove valuable to many people.

For example:

• Uninstaller – Izpack provides the option of creating an uninstaller to undo/remove/delete all actions performed by the installer. By default, Izpack can ‘remove installed’ artifacts from the OS but complete ‘restore to original’ can be accomplished with a combination of backing up pre-install, scripting and deletions.
• Highly modifiable – most default features can be extended to create customized objects for any installer. Some community participants have even suggested features which they have, in turn, added themselves back to IzPack. Neat!
• Can be built with Maven and Maven rocks – enough said.
• Can run external scripts (bat, sh, etc.).
• Can run ANT scripts. – This one feature alone helps me use ANT in all its splendor from IzPack making me look like a hero and I need all the help.
• Localizable installers – IzPack provides multiple language options pre-install and provides translations for every element by default. One only needs to translate one’s own text.
• Can do silent installs – Properly developed, all IzPack installers can be built to run as silent installs and use a ‘properties’ file for otherwise prompted inputs.
• Can do command line installs – Useful if he operator only has SSH into a computer, IzPack installers can be built to command line mode so that they can be run from a prompt.

You can read about other features at the project’s website features page.  Also, Julien did a presentation and slides are available online which are worth a good look regardless where they are hosted.

I am not certain if I will get to build our company’s upcoming installers or when will these get built.  I know IzPack will easily fill our needs and I hope I have the opportunity to use it in a professional capacity soon enough.

Going thru this exercise has helped me understand a bit about creating data cubes and the uses they serve. This is but one of the many interesting (to me) things I am exposed to at work. Doing this from scratch provides me with insight unattainable with a ‘shrink-wrap’ tool.

Note – I had originally fetched data from accross the web but had to store xml files internally for show and tell. Enjoy.