Pentaho BI Server 3.5

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Hello Pentaho friends,

Pentaho BI Server 3.5 RC1 (***) is released and this great news indeed! There are lots of new features in there, major advances to Pentaho Report designer, Pentaho Metadata, enhancements to Pentaho Dashboard Designer including a new chart editor and an interactive data grid, along with
numerous usability enhancements and maintenance fixes.

Personally I’m particularly pleased with the usability side of the story.* Years ago when I joined Pentaho I rooted for us to pass the “Report ready on my own data in 5 minutes” benchmark. Granted, this is usually not even possible with closed source BI gear but let’s not use that sort of software as a standard, mkay?* Well, I’m happy to report that we’re getting really close to that goal with this 3.5 release.* The auto-generation of Pentaho Metadata models and nifty things like Will Gormans in-line ETL support for CSV file reading really is ground-breaking stuff. (Kettle doing the work, yeah!)* The back-end story is interesting and there is a lot to say about that, but the most important thing is that it makes it easy to create reports on your own data.

On top of that, if you used the old report designer, you wouldn’t recognize the new one, it’s that much better. Take a look at the video series on Youtube on the subject:

• Pentaho Report Designer v3.5 - 1: Creating a Report (9:06)
• Pentaho Report Designer v3.5 - 2: Creating a Parameterized Report (3:21)
• Pentaho Report Designer v3.5 - 3: Publishing a Report to the BI Server (3:29)

It’s amazing to see how much work got cranked out by our team at Pentaho in the last year, not just on the “bling bling” but also solving back-end issues like unified file formats, charting standards, etc.

It’s also interesting to note that Pentaho keeps releasing the majority of its software under an open source license in a time where our direct competitors are doing exactly the oposite.

All this and a few “other things” make me really look forward on the year to come.

Go Pentaho!!

Reporting from Pentaho HQ in Orlando, until next time,

Matt

*** RC1 means “Beta 1″ as in “for evaluation, not production” purposes folks!



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