Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers - Review

So, I've finally finished the book Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers. Thanks to Richard Dias from Packet Publishing for the opportunitty and apologies for writing this so late.

So, as I told in the last pentaho reporting book post this book is really good if you need a faster learning curve or if you need advanced reporting capabilities like subreporting, crosstabs, complex functions, styling, etc; but is totally needed if you plan to extend the capabilities of the reporting engine such as Swing or JS events, weird data sources, new report elements or direct interaction trough the reporting API.

So the first chapter An Introduction to Pentaho Reporting , gives you a nice introduction to the reporting software as well the architecture of the product.

Chapter two, Pentaho Reporting Client and Enterprise Examples ,show you how to build basic reports and also how to deploy them into a Swing application or Java web container.

Chapter three, Pentaho Reporting Examples in the Real World, chapter six, Including Charts and Graphics in Reports, and chapter seven, Parameterization, Functions, Formulas, and Internationalization in Reports are the parts I recommend if you are interested in building complex and nice reports (you know, with images, sub reports, well suited to be exported to Excel, with groups, formulas, charts, etc). If you follow the samples in each chapter you'll become almost an advanced report builder.

The fourth chapter, Design and Layout in Pentaho's Report Designer explains the detail of every option in the Report Designer: menu, toolbars, bands, report elements, shortcuts, etc. While this chapter can be a little bit boring I recommend to give it an overview reading cause it has some tips inline while is explaining every detail of the items.

Fifth chapter, Working with Data Sources gives you detailed information of the existing data sources who can feed the report and also how to build custom data sources. If all your reports will be from a database you can skip the chapter.

Chapter eight, Adding Sub-Reports and Cross Tabs to Reports gives you a little  more insight in subreporting and also how to construct reports from MDX queries (OLAP). If you plan to make reports who need a pivot table layout you need to read the chapter.

Chapter nine, Building Interactive Reports explains how to use events in your reports both in JS (click events, hyperlinks, DOM, Jquery) or in Swing. Nice chapter if you need to deploy reports with high interaction or very dynamic from the UI perspective.

Chapter ten, API-based Report Generation, and eleven, Extending Pentaho Reporting, gives you the developer perspective. Things like how to generate a report on the fly, custom expression/functions, new report elements (and how to show them in the designer) and bean shell expressions are covered in those two chapters. This chapters are recommended for developers who plan to extend the nice features of the designer or need to do something very weird.

Finally chapter eleven, Additional Pentaho Reporting Topics show other issues like how to embed reports in the Pentaho BI Engine, publish to mobile browsers and how to ask for help in the Pentaho Communitty.

Well I hope this review to be useful for you, next post will be the same review but in Spanish

A status update

So, I totally forgot my blog until the people from Packt Publishing asked me for the reviewing of Pentaho Reporting book. Now I want to speak about what I have been doing this year.

While I continued with the KPI reporting and information systems the objective of the area I'm managing became broader: Now I'm in charge of the network management systems.

We have several of these systems most of them are propietary and focused in one technology or subset of the HFC and Core networks. The really interesting system is a generic one that We built using open source tools: CACTI for high scale network SNMP measurement collection, NAGIOS/CENTREON/NAGVIS for active ICMP/service checking, and a combination of NET-SNMP, SNMPTT and SYSLOG-NG.

While it is difficult to integrate and manage, its a very good solution to scale and manage the events and traps of all the network with a low cost (the same engineer you would dedicate to a propietary solution plus the hardware).

Also I dedicated a lot of effort customizing TRAC for managing all the requirements to the area. I've found in TRAC a useful tool but with a lack of good reporting modules.

So thats the summary of the year...while I still follow pentaho and databases with passion also I have learnt about SNMP, monitoring, traps.

Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers

So, it seems I can't get used to write in my blog often. Lately I've been working with monitoring tools (cacti, nagios, snmptt, etc), so I have left BI and pentaho a little bit aside.

A couple of weeks ago I had the oportunity to review the Pentaho Reporting for Java Developers book, so It reminds me about the cool open source BI platform again.

So far, I've read half of the book and all the insides of this nice reporting tool are very well explained. I haven't used pentaho reporting before but I used Crystal Reports a couple of years ago so I knew the basics of the reporting tool.

When you use reporting tools, the learning curve is slow, so if you can get the insides and details to accomplish not only the basic stuff but things like subreporting, complex styles, etc it would be much better. And I think that's the objective of the book...explain you how to do useful things with reporting.

I'll review the complete book later when I finish reading it.

Infobright goes open source!

Long time without write in this blog...have been too too busy in my new job.

Anyway since yesterday I'm glad to see that infobright, a data warehousing storage engine for mysql has been released as open source.

You can see the news here .

To the mysqlers that are using this good database for data warehousing this is a pretty good new one. As Robin states in the article when you reach the 1-2 TB in your mysql db you must begin to do lot of tricks to make things works.

Please check the Infobright website! http://www.infobright.org/

Office, visio, project

Seems like when you are in a non technical position you must use these Microsoft tools very often....which is sad because I don't want lose my Linux desktop as the main os I use in the work...

So in these last days I basically tested: vmware and wine.

• Vmware

The thing with vmware...it works fine but you must startup windows every time inside vm...and...the applications aren't integrated into the desktop.

• Wine

The good thing with wine is that windows apps are integrated in the window manager....the bad...make programs works is a pain....Now it seems that word is running but not sure what surprise it will give when I use it with more detail....

Thanks to my friend Tom for the support...

A good new one

I think this post will be quite large...sorry if You get bored with it......
The good one: I will change my job. I resigned yesterday to my current job as an information system analyst in a telco operator. I will move to a big cable and tv company as Traffic and Dwh Director.

First, I have to say I'm quite happy about the change but I have a mix of feelings as is natural. I was engineer there for three years and a half. In that time I made a lot of good friends and workmates. Also I think this three years was a period where I learn a LOT of useful things. In this job I had the opportunity to play with linux, MySQL, tomcat, mondrian, pentaho, kettle, clusters, SANs etc. and while I am not an expert in any of those things I have a good knowledge in each of them.

Sadly things have been going to the wrong side in the area ( caution note: these are personal opinions :) ). Since Millicom bought the company and the managers went off the area has become less and less relevant for the organization. The hope that our developed software and knowledge can be extended to other operations worldwide (a thing that can be possible because Millicom have more than twenty operations around the world) is almost lost. I have to say Millicom doesn't like home development teams so our existance is practically hidden from the headquarters.

Moreover the new management style is very precipitated (the high level management not my direct boss...my direct boss is a very good leader and friend). Today we have a new project, tomorrow is canceled, today we exist, tomorrow not. Things were needed in 4 hours no matters the quality cost and the entropy added to the team.

You would think that my ex job was a bad job. That is not true. As I said i faced a lot of interesting problems, and learn lot of things. Also there are good organizational practices there.

Anyway I'm pretty happy because:

• I will manage the dwh cycle
  
• I will have the opportunity to lead a technical team
• Is a demostration that the good job is rewarded sooner or later
• I will have to show that peter principle is wrong

And many other reasons! so expect technical and managerial posts from now! My desire is not to abandon the technical skills only to use them to lead software projects to the expected results...so my leadership will be from a technical perspective.

And to my good friends in ##pentaho irc channel....I will ask a lot there!...be prepared! :)

Back from holidays

Hey!
Today is my first job day after the holidays and I have to say: I'm out of form.

Anyway...holidays were great, as I told in the last post I went to Valledupar and to Santa Marta. There I take a very good rest. The two weeks I stayed in Bogotá I did this:

Bought a new pc: Intel Quad Core 64 bits, 4GB Ram, 320GB, Nvidia graphics card, etc...This pc will be my home development server.

Did the eye surgery: I no longer use lens!

Played a LOT of squash: Two times a day!

I'm very happy with the holidays I took..I feel they changed my daily routine and now I'm ready to work.

Btw...Colombia is a great place to take holidays!