The only downside of the openI and Pentaho integrations is the manner in which they store the datasource information, it's not centralized very well, which should be rather trivial to overcome. I spent a good part of today getting Oleg and Kirill's datawarehouse component running off a FoodMart database. Still buggy, but I did get a result set to display in a pivot table.
I wrote Oleg and Kirill off list to see if they'd be interested in sticking their head back in it since their project has been dormant since about July. Their implementation utilizes the same controller.xml that we're used to, the same service calls we're used to and runs off of the screen widget. All in all, a lot of promise. Because it uses the controller and screen widget, the schema definition can benefit from a lot of reuse in separating the dimensions into screens. After that, create a simple way to generate the MDX query and we'd have a pretty powerful tool. (after pulling the data from traditional ofbiz that we're interested in, of course) Oleg's and Kirill's component uses Octopus for the ETL, but I haven't evaluated that, nor am I sure what I should be evaluating for that. I'm still working out some bug's in Oleg and Kirill's component so let me know if anyone is interested AND has time and I'll post a patch to their work otherwise I'll post it when it seems pretty clean. --- Jacopo Cappellato <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Chris, > > it is obviously difficult for me to compare the features that I can > offer to the rich set of the ones offered by a suite of > open-source/commercial softwares: in fact I don't have anything at > the > moment on my desk! > In my opinion, the drafted plan that I'm considering could lead to a > better/cleaner set of dimensions and facts (derived by the OFBiz data > > model); if in the process we will find good ways of integrating (or > just > using) external tools (and I hope this will happen) I would be more > than > happy to invest some time in their integration. > > Maybe, it would be really helpful at this stage to find out what are > the > *cons* of integrating an external suite for datawarehouse; for > example, > since you did some experiments integrating such tools in OFBiz, what > are > the problems (if any) you found using them with OFBiz? What are the > challenges we will have to resolve if we try to integrate them? > > Thanks, > > Jacopo > > > Chris Howe wrote: > > Inline.. > > --- Jacopo Cappellato <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >> Chris, > >> > >> first of all, thanks for your interest on this subject. > >> Please, see my comments inline: > >> > > > >> Building ETL services and an initial star schema (that I guess is > >> what > >> you refer to with denormalized entities) is my primary goal now. > > > >>From the Pentaho site > > > > * Mondrian - Open Source OLAP Server > > * JFreeReport - Open Source Reporting > >>> * Kettle - Open Source Data Integration (E.T.T.L.) << > > * Pentaho - Comprehensive Open Source BI Suite > > * Weka - Open Source Data Mining > > > > ETTL means... > > > > * Extraction of data from one or more databases > > * Transport of data from one location to an other > > * Transformation of data > > * Loading of data in a data warehouse > > > > So their's even has an extra "T" ;) > > > >> The star schema will be built in a relational database but > >> essentially > >> is composed of: > >> a fact table (e.g. "Sales Transactions") > >> a set of dimension tables (e.g. "Products", "Date", "Time", > "Stores" > >> etc..) > >> Usually the fact table is only useful inside one star schema, > while > >> dimensions are shared among many star schemas. > >> I'd like to build a common, based on best practices set of > dimensions > >> > >> (and a few fact tables that use them) derived from the OFBiz data > >> model. > >> You can then use the tool you want to run your reports/analysis > >> etc... > >> I don't know how Mondrian works, but by what you say here it seems > >> that > >> you can use Mondrian on top of these star schemas. > >> > > > > That is almost an exact description of what a cube is in Mondrian > and > > from what I understand Microsoft's OLAP as well > > http://mondrian.pentaho.org/documentation/schema.php#Cube > > > > >
