This may look like a cyclic dependency... using a CDA datasource in PRD, while CDA itself uses PRD libs. Believe me, it's not, and it's incredibly handy to have a "dictionary of querys" on the server and just query them from your report. Caching comes for free, it's all executed in the server, it'll save hours of pain waiting for the hard queries to get executed. I know this is something that PRD 3.8 fixed, but having the cache on server is a huge bonus
In order to use this, just drop this jars in PRD-3.8 lib dir and it'll just work!
Here's the main message of this blog post: Firefox 4 was released, get it now. It's an amazing piece of work, done by, and for the community.
As Mozilla Metrics team members we prepared a dashboard to monitor this release using several sources of information, and one of them is twitter, basically, "what are people saying about us?"
This obviously requires a different approach compared to normal BI; We need almost realtime data, a blazing-fast response and search capabilities. Perfect opportunity to a NoSQL approach.
We already had a very good experience using solr, an enterprise search platform that runs on top of Lucene. This time we decided to use ElasticSearch, also an Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful, Search Engine built on top of Lucene. While the principle is very much the same as Solr, the fact that ES thinks in JSON for both query DSL and indexing documents add more BI-like features to it.
The result? Nothing less than astonishing! Using regular CDA to connect to elasticsearch, we were able to do our CDE dashboard development using the regular techniques. NoSQL datasource? SQL datasource? Excel? Don't care - it's all data.
Here's the screenshot as of... well, now (5pm, Europe/Lisbon time):
Important things to note:
At 5pm, firefox 4 noise is bigger than IE9 related noise for it's release date
User feedback is great!
Here's a quick screencast of it working, courtesy of Daniel Einspanjer, master of Metrics. Amazing stuff, thanks Daniel:
The best part about community projects is when you get adoption to the point where you start getting very valid community contributions. And that's happening with CCC, the best / most powerful / most extensible charting engine available (and not only for pentaho). All in all, god's gift to visualization *cof*
Cees van Kemenade, from Vinzi, added heatmaps and fixed y axis with overlays. It's been merged to the main code and we're now working on giving those features from within CDE.
For ages we've been working on allowing us (and everyone else, by using an opensource model) the ability to develop Pentaho dashboards faster and better.
That was the motivation behind CDF, CDE, CCC, CDA and all the other Cs. We are now able to present a service where our goal is to be the "developing hand" of dashboards to the pentaho user base.
We present: ShowBiz
In a nutshell, here's how it works:
You tell us what you think you want
We deliver what you didn't even dream was possible :)
