From the olap4j team

I posted this message today on the olap4j mailing list. In the interest of reaching a broader audience, I will copy it here as well.

Cheers!

Dear olap4j community members,

As we previously discussed on this mailing list, we are planning to make the final push towards a 1.0 specification. In order to perform those much needed changes and still maintain compatibility as much as possible, the olap4j team proposes the following transition plan.

• 4th week of July - Release of olap4j 0.9.8
  A first initial release, coded 0.9.8, will be performed during the days to come. This release is mostly a wrap-up of the unofficial releases we have put in the Maven repository. Notable changes include compatibility with SAP BW, contextual drill-through for the Query Model, along with various other compatibility fixes.


• Month of August
  During the month of August, the olap4j community will have a chance to comment the proposed changes to the 1.0 final draft. We will provide an updated functional specification document as well as a complete list of the changes that will be required. Should you judge that some items are still missing, or that some should be modified or removed altogether, you are encouraged to let us know. The mailing list is the best place to hold those discussions, or you can also use our forums.


• September 1st - Release of 0.9.9
  September 1st is the date that marks the end of our discussions. After that, all the changes that we agreed upon will be implemented in the API, as well as the Mondrian and XML/A implementations of the driver. The 0.9.9 release will include those changes, but will still maintain retro-compatibility. Some API calls will be marked for deprecation, new ones will be present as well. The 0.9.9 release will be the last available before 1.0. Everything that is marked for deprecation will be removed as of 1.0, so users will have a chance to convert their code base progressively.


• October 31st - Release of 1.0
  We are planning to release olap4j 1.0 on October 31st. All methods that have been marked as deprecated, whether by the 0.9.9 release or any other previous 0.X release will be removed.

A proposed updated functional specification document, as well as a detailed list of API changes will be sent in the following days, right after the 0.9.8 release. We strongly encourage the users of olap4j to express any concerns or ideas that might arise.

Sincerely yours

Luc Boudreau, for the olap4j development team

Pentaho’s Road To Profitability - Take 2

Tom Barber, a collaborator of mine, one of the most active community member of the Pentaho project, posted a very interesting blog entry this week. He is looking back at the path of Pentaho Corporation, a commercial open source business intelligence company, and their latest strategies for growth. He notes that in the past months, Pentaho has put a lot of effort in marketing initiatives and hired many big wigs in their marketing staff. In his opinion, this is somewhat against the ideals of commercial OSS development.

The commercial open source business model is still very young and has not encountered many great challenges up to now. Nor has it sailed in very troubled waters. Yet some signs are already warning people to be very careful with the years to come. Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) was surviving thanks to donations. Compiere recently made the news for all the bad reasons. Red Hat is doing pretty well though. In a nutshell, anything is still possible; good or bad.

Tom’s wish was that Pentaho would rather focus on paying skilled engineers rather than sales people. Now, as much as somewhat agree with the general idea, one must keep in mind that there is no correlation between the number of talented people getting paid to be on a project and it’s success. Some notoriously successful projects depend almost entirely on it’s community base. Mozilla Corporation to name only one. Others employ thousands of employees, yet achieve mediocre results. One could also argue that an effective marketing campaign will in fact boost people’s awareness, thus getting more talented people to join the community base. There is no tested and fail proof recipe so far. As I said earlier, everything goes.

I worked for the past months for a commercial open source company, and the same questions and uncertainties were part of every day discussions. How can a software company making no revenues on licensing be profitable? SQL Power Group, my employer, sponsors the only open source data modeling tool that works cross-platforms and offers, for free, the majority of the functionality included in widely known proprietary tools like ErWin. There are on a weekly basis between five hundred and a thousand downloads of SQL Power Architect. This is a lot for an OSS project in such a narrow niche. Yet a very small proportion of those are actually paying for support/consultancy, or making donations.

There are a lot of factors in play. First off, people willingly using OSS have overall better technical skills than others. To be fair, not every OSS is of acceptable quality, but you get to try as many as you want. Proprietary software is not better in any way, but you won’t get to try many of them, short of having very good contacts and/or deep pockets. This is one reason why reaching the tipping point of adoption is very hard for an OSS company. The percentage of OSS users ready to pay instead of figuring things by themselves is low. Way low. Waaayyy loooww. If you paid for software, you want support (and vice versa). You feel obliged to use the software because you already invested much in it. (Yes, money is time, time is money.) If you didn’t pay for the software and you hit a snag, you are far more likely to stop using it altogether. By abandoning it, you feel like you are exercising damage control, since you save time (thus money). You didn’t pay so why invest time? I’m fully aware that once you do the math, you realize that it’s the exact opposite. People usually don’t.

What does all that have to do with Tom? Well first thing first. Starting next week, I’ll be an employee of Pentaho Corporation. Yup. Am I a big wig? Nope. Am I a marketing guy? Well, I’m good looking, but not good enough with oxymoron. Am I a marketer? I’m having trouble making this blog post interesting, so nope, not a marketer either. I’m just some skilled dude who got his hands dirty for years and now decided that he would devote some serious time to make things better.

Look at it this way. In Tom’s vision of Pentaho, my ass is on the line. I deeply respect his insights on the market and software development in general. Yet here I am, proud as a peacock on a Sunday brunch, about to be part of this fantastic project. Am I worried? Hell no. I’m very enthusiastic about Pentaho having enough budget for marketing initiatives. This is exactly what OSS companies need; market awareness. People need to know you exist and that you are just as good as all those Fortune 100 companies. Even better than these. It has nothing to do with being a sell out. Marketing is not bad for your grassroots values, unless you make it so. Then again, you have only yourself to blame.

OSS companies need to reach the critical mass of contributors and adoption needed to survive. There is simply no other way. OSS users are picky, grumpy, bitchy and unforgiving. I know that for a fact. You want to thrive in that market share? You need two things. Proper marketing and skilled engineers. I’ll be doing my part in the later, and I’m very confident that the good people at Pentaho have picked skilled people to cover the former.

We are competing against giants, so let’s give them a ride for their money.

Monkey Business

Last week we worked on a guerilla-marketing video for Wabit. I'll let you be the judge of that.

mdx4j - MDX query language parser

Last week I launched a spin off of the olap4j parser. Mdx4j wraps olap4j's MDX parser and makes it available to code, without the need of an olap connection.

Why?

Although olap4j contains a SPI parser, we don't want to promote any particular MDX syntax. I therefore packaged it as a separate project so that everyone can have a piece of the pie!

final String query =
"SELECT{} ON COLUMNS FROM CUBE";

final MdxParser parser =
Mdx4jParserFactory.createMdxParser();

final ParseTreeNode tree =
parser.parseSelect(query);

http://code.google.com/p/mdx4j/

All in one BI tool for the non-geeks

A colleague of mine once asked me if I knew a program that can connect to almost all relational databases and offers MsAccess like features to build queries. Sure thing says I. Wabit.

So he downloads it and installs it in 5 minutes. It's free and open source. No hassle. He then creates his connections and manages to do everything he needs to fulfil his duties as a business analyst. Pretty kewl story, heh? Short too. But that's a good sign because as a developer on this project, I can confirm first hand that this is exactly what we aimed for. Making business intelligence easy and painless.

The Wabit is more than that. It's also an OLAP data warehouse browsing and reporting tool. It creates charts in 10 seconds and features a template engine for easy corporate branding. Version 1.0 will feature a server repository for multi-user collaboration and incremental saves, scheduling and fine grained security. The enterprise server is not open sourced though, but the Wabit client is a fully featured platform. You can still save all your queries and reports as an XML file for easy import and export and share it with your fellow co-workers.

The Wabit approaches 1.0 now. We need to reinforce the community around it and we need more feedback. The Wabit works on all platforms with a Java JVM, so whatever your background is, I'm sure that we can make good use of your comments or contributions. You are a GUI designer or a BI consultant or even just the regular Java developer, we have need of your help.

Wabit on Google Code
Wabit homepage

Creating Mondrian Schemas with Power*Architect

Since I don't have time to write much software myself these days, I figured I'd share this gem with you all. SQL Power, the Canadian Business Intelligence Authority (that's their tag line these days...), sponsors many open source projects. One of them is called Power*Architect; a marvellous cross-platform data modelling tool.

As far as I know, there are close to none "enterprise ready" data modelling tools that work on Linux and Mac. I also suspect none are free, whatever the platform. Visio is certainly not one of them.

Why is it so wonderful? Well, to start with, it can retro/forward engineer most JDBC compatible databases. That's a big plus. And it gets better. You can also use it to create a Mondrian schema. Yep. The team at SQL Power published a tutorial for that last week.

I do have to disclose that I will be working on their projects starting in October. I'm not trying to sell it to you; it's free anyways.  One thing is for sure though. I can't wait to get my hands in there. So I encourage everyone to grab a copy here and fill as many bug reports as you can. It's not 1.0 yet, so community contributions are a must. Having worked with the team for three weeks back in July, I can guarantee that each and every reported bug and suggested feature is closely studied by the development team.

Connect Microsoft SQL Server from olap4j

Browsing my Google Analytics statistics, I realized there is a lot of people out there that are searching for ways to connect Microsoft SQL Server with olap4j.

Here is a nice example.

// We must use the XMLA driver.
Class.forName("org.olap4j.driver.xmla.XmlaOlap4jDriver");

// This code is for Java 5. With Java 6, you can directly
// unwrap the underlying connection with the .unwrap() call.
OlapConnection connection =
(OlapConnection) DriverManager.getConnection(

// This is the SQL Server service end point.
"jdbc:xmla:Server=http://example.com/olap/msmdpump.dll"

// Tells the XMLA driver to use a SOAP request cache layer.
// We will use an in-memory static cache.
+ ";Cache=org.olap4j.driver.xmla.cache.XmlaOlap4jNamedMemoryCache"

// Sets the cache name to use. This allows cross-connection
// cache sharing. Don't give the driver a cache name and it
// disables sharing.
+ ";Cache.Name=MyNiftyConnection"

// Some cache performance tweaks.
// Look at the javadoc for details.
+ ";Cache.Mode=LFU;Cache.Timeout=600;Cache.Size=100",

// XMLA is over HTTP, so BASIC authentication is used.
"username",
"password" );


// We can execute a query. MDX of course.
CellSet set = connection.createStatement().executeOlapQuery(
"SELECT {} ON COLUMNS FROM CUBE");

Update : Some useful links

• How to: Install Analysis Services by Using Setup


• SSAS Clients Architecture


• Olap4j latest builds

PAT 0.3 - Integration and nifty features…

Pentaho Analysis Tool sprint 2 is now over and released since a few weeks. We're currently in the process of wrapping up the third sprint. What's new? What new features will there be?

Nothing very spectacular really. Yet there are a few nice features worth mentioning.

• Integration with the Pentaho BI server
  PAT can now run embedded in the Pentaho User Console and be configured remotely. It only supports XMLA connections for this first draft, but don't worry; more compatible connection types are to be supported in the medium term. This also means that you can seamlessly use any XMLA provider. Sql Server? Essbase? Mondrian? You choose. All that thanks to olap4j. If you want specific details on this, Gretchen Moran has written a bunch of documentation on this. Congratulations to Paul Stoellberger and Gretchen Moran for this feature.


• Create multiple queries at once
  This was a requirement that was passed to us by Pentaho's engineering team. People want to build and use more than one query at a time without concurrency issues. That was not properly supported by the age old JPivot application. Now and then we encountered some problems with multiple queries, so this was something pretty high on our features list. The backend supported that since sprint 1 , but there was higher priorities for the GUI components.


• OlapTableModel first draft
  The Java API doesn't include a proper TableModel for OLAP data, so we're planning to write one. We still have lots of things to figure out on this subject, but we're planning to mock a draft specification before the sprint 3 deadline.

Our initial intent for the third sprint was to make the GUI nicer, but we're still trying to figure out if XUL would be a better generation tool than SWT. We are waiting for developments between the GWT-Mosaic team and Nick Baker of Pentaho and hope that all those nice gents would team up and cook something up to their talent. Fingers crossed here. :)

Also worth mentioning,  we started talks to review the Query model currently residing in olap4j. This is a soon to be major component as it will provide developers and GUI enthusiasts with a properly abstracted API to build queries against a data warehouse. Olap4j is  very great API for low level stuff, but it still needs an abstraction layer for the common folks. Building queries should not require in-depth knowledge of MDX, for you cannot expect all business analysts to master MDX anyways. Anyone who wants to participate in the process is warmly invited to manifest himself. We are really looking for input on this, whatever your background is. (As long as it's related to BI I guess...)

Pentaho Analysis Tool - Final push for sprint 2

I've been really busy lately working on sprint 2 of Pentaho Analysis Tool. We almost reached all our goals for this sprint and are hoping to wrap it all up in the next two weeks. There is still time to add a few late requirements in this sprint so if anyone has a very special wish, now is the time to express it.

About Pentaho Analysis Tool (PAT)


PAT is an attempt to replace the good ol' JPivot application, widely used in the Java world, as a web based browser for OLAP data. There are quite a few similar projects out there, yet none of them quite make the cut in terms of enterprise requirements.

• Ad-hoc connections


• ACL management


• User defined connections saved for later use


• Saved queries


• Multiple queries editing at once


• [ insert even more entreprise software mumbo jumbo here]

We're writing a Google Web Toolkit (GWT) front-end and a Spring based backend as a core. All data manipulations are possible thanks to the Olap4j API. There was talk of a Json bridge later on in development, but this requirement is not part of any sprint planning for now.

The project is hosted on Google code and all the project management is done in the Jira tracker. If you have any further questions about our project or want to chat for whatever reasons, we can be reached via the mailing list or ##pentaho.pat on freenode.

Of easy and painless systems monitoring

I'm not a systems administrator. I only have 8 servers to babysit and it used to be enough to be a time consuming problem. You might not be a systems administrator either, nor have many machines / services / websites to monitor, yet the fact remains that as IT professionals we need to keep a close eye on what's going on. I'm not talking about 99.999% uptime here, but a 1% downtime is enough to make a lot of customers, clients and managers angry; especially since outages have a way to happen exactly when it should not.

What are your options? How much does it cost? What can you monitor? These are all questions I'll try to shed a light on. The solution I'm proposing today is one I used myself for years. I'm not legally obliged to 5-9 availability, yet this is what I achieved with a total cost of 0. Yep, z.e.r.o. zero. El zilcho.

I'm not saying this will work for anybody, neither am I pretending to be an expert on the issue at hand, but I learned a lot in a few years on the subject so here it is.

Evading (D)DOS attacks with Apache HTTPD

Just a quick tech-tip. Ever wondered how to prevent your HTTPD server from being knocked off the net by a DOS (Denial Of Service) attack? Check this nifty little module.

Mod Evasive

Its pretty easy to setup. Compile the module as you would normally do for HTTPD modules and create a configuration file. There are many options available. Here's an example of how to configure it.

<IfModule mod_evasive20.c>
DOSHashTableSize 3097
DOSPageCount 6
DOSSiteCount 100
DOSPageInterval 2
DOSSiteInterval 2
DOSBlockingPeriod 600
DOSEmailNotify "my-monitoring-contact@domain.com"
DOSWhitelist  192.168.*.*
</IfModule>

More details on the configuration and how each parameter will affect the module behavior can be found out there on the net.

Beware though, before installing this, make sure you won't blacklist some legitimate users. For example, if you have a AJAX application that sends a burst of requests once in a while, it might get blacklisted. Make sure you test it in a development environment so you get the thresholds right.

Of OLAP and the importance of open standards

In these times of economical crisis, many companies will turn to business intelligence (BI) as a source of wisdom and counsel. Millions of dollars will be invested in an effort to understand the extend of their respective problems and find solutions based on accurate and decision oriented datasets.

Since I have a fairly good amount of experience with work in heterogeneous environments and tackling data integration challenges, I thought I'd pitch in my two cents.

Why developers and project managers will have a hard time

The root of the problem is this. The Microsoft OLAP toolkit does not integrate so well with anything else than .NET technologies. SAS offers a Java API, yet it is not ready for production. (I worked with it for two years, and believe me, they are still a fairly long way to production quality code.) As a matter of fact, most software vendors in the OLAP world distribute some API to integrate their technologies, but you often end up with black boxes of questionable quality, flexibility or performance. Some even go as far as to obfuscate their libraries... this really doesn't help in the end.

Some vendors like Oracle went for the all-in-the-box solution. They offer a "complete" solution that can fit every possible need. Then again, what they are telling you is: if we don't have it, you probably don't need it."Probably"? You got to be kidding. Since when does software vendors know what you need and what your future will be? Better switch probably for hopefully.

In the best case, in order to meet your needs, you'll hack your way through at the expense of your project specifications. The final result can be nothing but deceiving. Your celebration will be bitter and probably short lived, I fear.

About the importance of collective work

You have a brand new application. Hooray! This is where the production phase kicks in.

What if you need to move your datamart to another OLAP server? What if there are not enough connections licenses to allow both production connections and all of your maintenance personnel on the OLAP server and they are forced to take turns to debug? What if the CEO decides to migrate to a new platform? What if [insert random but oh so frequent unforeseen event here]? Your thousand dollar code is now rendered useless; you can start crying now, you deserve it. In your quest for more money making, you've created a monster that was expensive and will continue to pump the money out of your institution pockets.

If you were good enough in systems design, you thought about a data layer. The data layer still remains to be rewritten entirely and it often represents at least a third of the overall effort. Close, but no cigar. This might sound like a catastrophic scenario, but it is oh so frequent.

Many people got tired of all this non-sense we decided to work together. We decided that enough time and money was wasted on individual efforts that were ruined in the end.  It was time to agree on standards and share the product of our collective effort.

Take Hibernate for example. It is now a de facto standard when it comes to data mappers. For the Java version alone, it represents 859 thousand lines of code worth 12.8 million dollars in work hours. Think you can top that with your in-house data layer in times of economical crisis?

About Java OLAP

OLAP is a world in itself. You can't take relational paradigms and apply them to the multidimensional world. The .NET toolbox does have very nice libraries to do some neat OLAP stuff, then again, you're locked-in with SSAS. This is a no-no.

On the Java side, things are even worse. There is currently a big void in the Java OLAP market. No OLAP standard emerged at all. Thanks to the selfishness of the big players of the industry, the JOLAP initiative was a total failure. It never reached the final version, so the JSR-69 specification died quietly.

We at Olap4j tried to fill that gap with an open initiative. Everyone can pitch in. And I mean EVERYONE.

What makes Olap4j so kewl

You know the expression vendor lock-in? I hope you do, I *really* do, or else you'll learn it the hard way. Olap4j aims at solving exactly this problem. You can develop applications on it's API and switch the underlying OLAP engine without rewriting a single line of code. Not bad heh? Olap4j is more than a database driver. It is an open API built right on top of the JDBC industry standard where everyone collaborates to specify a common base onto which to build.

It even includes transformation libraries and testing facilities.

I want to kick the tires and use it right now

So far, it has two implementations ready to use. The Mondrian driver allows you to run the much acclaimed Mondrian open source OLAP engine as an in-process data provider.

There is also the XML/A generic driver that can connect to pretty much anything that talks XML/A, whether it's over HTTP or anything else you fancy using. This particular driver allows you to build applications that can switch to and from any of these OLAP engines :

• Hyperion Essbase


• Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services


• Infor


• Mondrian


• Palo

The Olap4j project is gaining momentum and we truly hope to see it become the standard in the Java world.

Data integration challenges tackled

Data integration in business environments can be a painful task. I mean REAL painful. The volume of data is huge, it does not cross-validate, it is dispersed in many heterogeneous formats, yadi yada. You know the song. Some day, I stumbled on Pentaho Data Integration (PDI).This was a real breakthrough.

First thing first, it's not subject to "vendor lock-in". It can read most data formats out there and can write it back to pretty much anything. This is a huge plus because gives it the ability to be used by a plenitude of user types and environments. Being written in Java also gives it an edge as an enterprise tool, for it is platform agnostic.

But the real advantages are not those trivial specifications. My love for PDI has much deeper roots. Simply put : it's powerful. Creating an integration process is a trivial matter. Drag and drop. Link. Execute. Those three simple steps will cover most of your business needs. Really, I mean it. Never again will I write a snippet of code to read a CSV file and write it's content in a database. Mark my words; NEVER! This is a waste of time and a developer who lives with his times should know that.

What about the real juicy stuff ?

As you suspected, there is much more to PDI than meets the eye. It can be clustered, it can use a database based repository for all processes, there are automatic documentation generation tools and is supported by a huge community. Many tutorials exist to address most business needs and challenges. It's well made, very stable and easily expandable with plugins for power users.

I strongly recommend to give it a try. The next version should be released soon and it will include many great new features. I met Matt Casters last June and had the chance to see for myself all the new functionalities that will make it to the next release. We're talking about visual performance bottleneck exploration and some more neat stuff you won't find anywhere else.

Cheers, and have a good time integrating !!

Pentaho on the iPhone

I successfully added the iPhone extension to my Pentaho platform today and I was more then impressed with the ease with which we can enable the whole platform to work seamlessly on those nifty little phones.

Oh yeah, I bought an iPhone too...

I'm slowly discovering the fun of having a cellular phone in my pocket. This is something that I never experienced before; never had a cell phone. I have to say that I'm glad it's a good phone, and sexy too.

The bottom line is : get one.

For those interested, here's the wiki page that says it all. Thanks to Will Gorman, senior developer at Pentaho,  who put this all up.

Field lessons - Securing a Linux server

There is this old saying which goes like :

"Linux is safe enough to keep it vanilla. Anything you add weakens it's security."

Okay, this is not an actual popular saying, but since most Linux server I saw in my career were configured in conformity to this piece of wisdom (sic), I decided to share some experience with basic and mandatory security measures to add on a Linux server... I'm just sooo tired of fixing broken servers that have been hacked.

There is a simple suite of programs to install and you'll be at the very least secured against kiddies and the like. Here it goes.

Securing the OS

Most of the time, the piece of software that was hacked was the OS itself. Not because there are awful flaws in Linux (or just any OS as a matter of fact), but because simple rules were not respected. How many of you who have configured servers can certify that they are protected against brute force attacks ? How many are protected against DoS attacks ? Linux, nor any other OS I've seen so far (correct me as you wish...) don't come with DoS or BF detection. Having a secured SSH access is mandatory these days, but what's the point of setting passwords when a simple brute force attack will break it.

Here are some solutions. The Advanced Policy Firewall (APF) is a simple Linux firewall that uses the iptables utility to create firewall rules on your system. Why APF and not iptables alone ? Because it integrated with a DoS detection tool and Brute Force Detection (BFD). The DoS tool will detect any Denial of Service attacks while BFD will monitor incoming connections and ban any IP who breaks easy to setup access throttling rules All these tools are free and compatible with most Linux flavors. Try em out! There are many more available from R-fx Networks, the company that maintains them.

As for the setup instructions, google for them; as always. There are many nifty tutorials out there and I won't copy them here :P

Web Applications Security

What if I told you that there is a generic way of applying a minimum security level to all your web applications at the OS level, thus simplifying the life of anyone who administers web servers. You might get frustrated by the fact that you didn't know this at the time you got hacked. You might even wonder how wonderful this would be for your web hosting server.

Well, I'm doing it.

I'll say it.

Ready ? There it is.

ModSecurity

Okay, this was the hard part. Now it will be much easier. It's a simple Apache HTTPD module that you add to your web server configuration and it will validate all requests against a set of nifty threat detectors. It uses regular expression to protect your applications against overflows, injections and whatever might be dangerous for them.

There is even a console available to monitor many installations and keep an eye out for alerts.

Easy to understand, easy to install. As always, google has all your answers.

The bottom line

The lesson to remember is that these tools take half a day of work to setup and they will save you sooo much trouble in the future that it is worthless to discuss the pertinence of using them. The tools are out there, for free. You'd be a fool not to use them.

CQFD

Olap4j and XML/A - One more step towards a true olap systems integration API

I've been working for a month now on some enhancements to the Olap4j project to make it more powerful and compatible. The good news is, I succeeded. The previous version, 0.9.5, lacked some basic functionalities which you would expect from a production ready XML/A driver.

For one, it's HTTP proxy didn't support cookies. his was a big problem since the myriad of requests required to populate Olap4j's meta data objects each created a new user session on the web service back-end. This was a no-no, but now it's fixed and kicking ass.

I also worked on a SOAP query cache. This is was a big piece of software engineering, since I'm not used to thread safe coding. Thread safe thignys are usually in the lower levels of BI application servers and those issues are tackled from the start. Thanks to Java's java.util.concurrent package, this was a breeze.

Those changes are not part of any release nor in the SVN yet. I'm still waiting for peer review before the whole commit, but for people eager to see what it looks like, I've created a neat little package for y'all.

Now I can move back to my next release of the University of Montreal's Pentaho platform... all work and no play makes Luc a dull boy.

Cheers !