Will Gorman’s Blog

Since we announced Agile BI back in 2009, we’ve been busy developing the initial set of features that demonstrate how a BI developer can quickly build models and analyze data within our ETL product, Pentaho Data Integration.  This past week, Jake Cornelius, our Director of Product Management, demonstrated Agile BI at the TDWI Bake-Off.  The audience was impressed, voting for Pentaho in the “Cool Stuff” category.  The team is now executing on its final feature sprint, and we’re aiming to release RC1 of the product around the end of March.  Check out the most recent milestones over on Agile BI’s community website!

We’ve been working hard at Pentaho to deliver the first milestone of Agile BI.  A little over a month ago, James Dixon, our CTO, presented to the community the initial concept, which includes integrating dimensional modeling and visualization within Spoon, our ETL environment.  Since that time, James and the engineering team at Pentaho have been sprinting towards this release, making the source code available in the open, along with adding additional capabilities including the ability to persist models and visualizations.

You can download the first milestone and begin experimenting with the beginnings of what we are considering phase 1 of the Agile BI initiative, which includes the ability to quickly model and visualize a single fact table metadata and olap model.  Feedback is always welcome, check out the Agile BI forum for more discussion.