Archive for July, 2008

Pentaho iPhone Coverage, Post on YouTube

Today I saw that Pentaho’s Business Intelligence iPhone Softare made it into Network World’s 20 cool third-party iPhone apps list. Check out slide 11! Very cool. Also, I posted the video over to youtube for all to share:

log4j, Mondrian MDX and SQL Logging

I’ve always struggled to get log4j working perfectly within the Pentaho BI Platform.  Before the release of JBoss 4.2.1, there was a log4j.xml conflict between JBoss’s config and regular web applications.  Now that Pentaho 1.7 PCI by default runs in JBoss 4.2.1, we finally have a hastle free way to manage logging.

We can now manage all of Pentaho’s logging within the pentaho war’s WEB-INF/classes/log4j.xml file.  Another reason why this is important to note is that Mondrian’s SQL and MDX logging, something we’re always taking a look at, moved from a Mondrian debug property to a log4j category in Mondrian 3.0.  To get MDX and SQL logging out of Mondrian:

Add two new categories to the log4j.xml file:

<category name="mondrian.sql">
<priority value="DEBUG"/>
</category>

<category name="mondrian.mdx">
<priority value="DEBUG"/>
</category>

Also, you’ll want to remove the explicit Threshold element from within the appenders.  When a Threshold is defined in an Appender, it overrides the individual category thresholds.  log4j is a powerful logging tool, but sometimes it can be difficult to configure.

Pentaho’s BI Extension for the iPhone

A little over a month ago, I had a simple idea to render Pentaho’s BI Suite within Apple’s iPhone Safari Browser.  After a couple of hours of work with the open source iUI javascript / css framework, I had a basic demo.  After showing it off to some of the folks here at Pentaho, we agreed that it would be fun to put out as a tech tip and make available to the community.

The tech tip includes specific iPhone views for the login and navigation, along with modifications to the parameter pages so they render nicely within iPhone’s Safari Browser.  A servlet filter is provided that detects the iPhone user agent, and renders the iPhone views instead of the standard browser view.  Also, Marc Batchelor made great suggestions to make my demo more production worthy.

I really enjoyed working with Pentaho’s marketing department on making this an official Pentaho announcement.  Lance, Jared C. and Wes did a fantastic job on the press release, video, and landing page.