How to build Charts in Pentaho? using xAction or using CDF? - dashboard

After lot of struggle and googling finally I have managed to develop one dashboard using Pentaho CDE. While googling I found out that many people use xAction files to create charts and then embed those files in dashboard.
So I would like to know which way is better in terms of maintenance, performance?
1) Using only Pentaho CDE or
2) Creating charts in xAction and then embedding those charts
What do usually people do to develop dashboards?

xActions are pretty much deprecated and are dying a slow painful death. However CDE is new and actively updated technology that is of the moment.
So CDE, all the way.
Perhaps you should blog your experiences - there are other blogs out there about using CDE and it is very easy to get started, so it would be interesting to know your specific troubles.

I think CDE dashboard better with the flash report

Related

Dreamweaver or learn do it from scratch

I would like to create a website (non commercial) for fun. After lot of thought, have decided to go ahead with Rails & Java (in the backend). The main challenge I am facing is with the UI - am not an expert - can work on Html/Css/Javascripts however it would take me much much longer and this is my bottleneck.
I am leaning towards Dreamweaver to build the UI. My question is - will using a tool like Dreamweaver really help me - an armature in UI to create a small web site or am I better off diving deep into CSS/JQuery-UI and then start coding...
In my opinion, drop dreamweaver. You should go look at Bootstrap. It's a very easy to use framework that will assist you in creating your own website from scratch. It's amazingly simple to use and has many jQuery plugins pre-packaged and ready to use.
I second Henry. But if you're new to frontend design; also something to note is the power of tools like chrome inspector to pick it all apart. It's a great way to quickly develop, but also by simply exploring, you'll find yourself learning it all very quickly.. But there's still a lot to learn.
Plus if you're looking into rails, dreamweaver just doesn't fit into the workflow. But then again, I can't imagine dreamweaver fitting into any workflow.

SSIS vs Pentaho

Has anyone used both of these to provide a good comparison. I am doing a school project so the cost of SSIS isn't an issue as we already have the license for it.
Background on whats going on. I will be downloading about 10 years of patent information into flat files. The result will be 2,080 delimited files. I want a way to load them into MS SQL server all at once. Then I want to be able to append additional files into the DB as they are released.
Speed of the software doesn't bother me much as I can just let it run overnight. I am just looking for something with some flexibility, and more importantly fairly easy to use. I have never done a project like this before and will be learning how to do this from the boards.
THANKS!
Have used both in real live projects. I do prefer Pentaho (PDI) over SSIS because of its ease of use and flexibility.
Do read a little on the subject before you start using it. There are a couple of excellent books on kettle (PDI), or you could just read the Get Started in the Help menu of PDI. The forum is a good place if you are stuck or ##pentaho on IRC.
What also helps a lot are the Samples that you can find in the Welcome Screen.
I hope you enjoy it, I know I still do. Have been using it since 2006 and am always pissed when I have to use SSIS on some project :-)
PS : use a jtds jdbc-driver to connect to a SQL Server db, it will save you some headaches
Hope this helps,
Bart
After spending a couple days developing an ETL package in PDI and SSIS I feel confident in saying that PDI is definitely more user friendly. The user interface alone is much cleaner and seems to flow in a manner that is very intuitive and as such easy to use.

.Net reporting and database contols

I am looking for a reporting and database contols solution. This post is not a rate the control but what has your experience been when using it.
I had a look at Telerik, DevExpress, Syncfusion and a few others. I have downloaded a copy of each and tested each for a week or so. However these arent cheap when I make the investment I would like to base it on othera experience as well as my own feel for the tools.
I had read all the post on SO and many other sites. Many outdated so wanted to know more recent experiences.
DevExpress looks great and seems to be what im lookig for however from what ive read their controls are coded and very differet ways. WPF is apparently very bad. I could be wrong though and please correct if i habe been misinformed.
Everyone seem to be happy with Telerik.
I will probably be customising later on so source is important. Winforms will be used. But would like to migrate to WPF and/or ASP.Net later. This is client requirements.
thanks in advance
You should list down your expectations from a third party suit.
Also its better to compare individual components rather than the whole suit.
I have lot of experience with devexpress#winforms, but the learning curve is quite steep.
I don't like the layout controls. Rest of the controls are pretty slick. Reports and Charts are good.
Support is also quite good.
I'm working with DevExpress scheduler for WinForms right now, and I can say only praises for this component suite. Everything is accessible easily, customizations are very easy; but to be honest I still haven't done any major customization, so it could be possible that 95% cases are easy, but that 5% is impossible (not sure, don't have that much experience with DevExpress). I would just say that they are much better than Infragistics WinForms suite.
Also reporting suite (XtraReports) is well known as a very good solution.

How to TDD for CouchDB with CouchApp?

Recently I've discovered CouchDB. I want to use CouchApp to build a flash games site. It looks like a perfect fit 'cause this kind of a site is totally document based with a bit of binary attachments.
The only thing I need to learn before I start is how to TDD with CouchApp/CouchDB. I couldn't google any workflow tutorial and I'm not experienced enough to adapt any existing server-side JS workflow to the CouchDB environment.
Your suggestions?
I looked at this and found jsunit and Jasmine.
I settled on jsunit for familiarity and because I had a book with some examples in it (yeah, I know a real scientific decision process).
I got what I wanted out of it, but an not entirely happy about the way of working in a browser as a test runner. I need to look at some ways to automate it in my build process.

Test Reporting

We are migrating our test report data (unit, regression, integration, etc..) from an XML format to a database format for better analysis. Right now the majority of our test analysis is done using the CruiseControl.NET dashboard, but this is limited to primarily the most recent test data. Older test data can be accessed but not easily compared to new test data. We want to pin point problem components and better narrow down bugs. With the onset of tons of information brought on by our newly implemented regression and integration testing I would like to see some better metrics generated (possibly performance and the like). Have you worked with any business intelligence systems that will provide a framework for accurately and easily implementing some sort of analysis and reporting?
I have looked into JasperReports and Pentaho but I'm struggling with implemetation of Pentaho at the moment. Should I continue my fight with the system? Is this what I'm looking for?
You could always just use SQL Server Reporting Services and Report Builder (MS's web based designer) or Report Designer (component of Visual studio). It's pretty easy to get this set up too.
Report Builder: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms155933.aspx
Report Designer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms157166.aspx
Tutorial: http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/beginning-sql-server-2005-reporting-services-part-1/
How to add Reporting Services to an existing SQL Server: http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1444
There are a few end user reporting solutions around as well that make it easier to dynamically create reports, if you're willing to invest a bit of cash.
My company produce one: http://www.rsinteract.com has a very cheap standard edition with a limited number of reports (30 day free trial). It reports directly off SQL server with Reporting Services installed. It won best of TechEd 2006 - http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/53944/best-of-tech-ed-2006-winners.html
We actually use ours to analyse the support requests from clients i.e. which component is failing most, who reports the most bugs etc. Not tried it on test data.
There's also Proclarity, ApexSQL Report, and Tableau all of which are good.
You could try looking at rolling your own (if you know what you're looking for) using Processing written by Ben Fry. It's best accompanied by his book "Visualizing Data".
The tool is free and I guess you can get a free 45 day trial of O'Reilly Books Online to get a head start and see if its right for you. I do know there are chapters on reading and crunching data from all kinds of sources (including XML and databases) and then making meaningful and useful visualisations from them.
I'm currently using it to get my head round the dependency complexities of an inherited code base and its been massively useful.
Which part of Pentaho?
The Kettle project has stuff to convert your Cruise Control info and load it into a relational database. That's probably a good module to get working properly, especially if you're almost done figuring it out. I hope you'll share this stuff. I could use it too.
The Platform will autoschedule stuff once Kettle has it loading.
To make Mondrian really useful you'll need to work out a fact / dimension organization to your test data. That may or may not be worth your trouble at this point.
Once you have your data loaded you'll probably be able to get a lot of benefit out of simple SQL queries like this...
select *
from test
where failed='yes'
order by testno, date desc
and this...
select max(date), min(date), testno
from test
where failed='yes'
group by testno
order by testno
and stuff like that. You might consider creating views in your table server for your favorite queries.
There are myriad ways to convert your sql queries into reports, including the pentaho reporting module, BIRT (an eclipse plugin), Crystal Reports, and all kinds of PHP or JSP stuff you could put together.

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