The company has now launched Mondrian 2.2, which is an OLAP open source project set up in 2001, and which Pentaho took over as chief steward and project owner of last November and integrated it into the Pentaho BI Suite as an Analysis Services component.
Pentaho has since been busy upgrading Mondrian, adding more administration and end-user features in July
Mondrian 2.2 now adds a new graphical cube designer tool that lets users construct and deploy multidimensional analysis applications aided by wizards. The designer tool eliminates the need for XML to define dimensions and create OLAP schemas that connects to relational data sources.
Other enhancements include improved performance and scalability for handling larger dimensions in Oracle databases. Pentaho has also optimized SQL queries for the open source MySQL database as well, including new caching options for data and metadata.
The aim of the upgrade, according to company CEO Richard Daley, is to simply development, lower the total of developing OLAP applications and expand Pentaho’s user-base.
Pentaho continues to prove that a community-driven model delivers product evolution more quickly than proprietary software models, he said.
Pentaho Cube Designer is available as a free Pentaho Public License and can be downloaded from the company’s website. It works with both the open source and Professional Editions of the Pentaho BI Suite.
OLAP isn’t the only area that Pentaho has been focusing on of late. The company has spent most of 2006 buying or enhancing several key components of its BI Suite.
At the start of this year company added JFreeReport, a Java report engine and library to its BI Suite, and has subsequently added more robust report design capabilities. It followed that up in April with the acquisition of the Kettle open source ETL project, which it also upgraded this summer with numerous performance and functional enhancements.
And only last month Pentaho acquired the Weka open source project, bringing data mining capabilities under its wing.
The Pentaho open source project was started in 2002 by former executives of leading commercial BI software firms like SAS Institute, Hyperion Solutions and Cognos.
The project aims to pull together an interoperable set of open source reporting, analysis, dashboarding, workflow and data mining capabilities which can be rapidly configured as an integrated BI platform.
Other open source projects that fall under Pentaho’s stewardship include JPivot, Firebird RDBMS and Enhyra Shark.
