Millersoft Ltd and Pentaho will exhibit at the Internet Retailing Expo on the 23rd of March 2011, Birmingham NEC. This exhibition includes the biggest players in Internet Retailing http://www.internetretailingexpo.com/exhib_list.php and we look forward to sharing our experiences using Pentaho with the delegates. Shortly before the event we will be conducting a Retail Focused webinar, where we will show Business Intelligence users how to combine customer and order data to target different market segments.

This video represents the outcome of a proof of concept, showing invoice line items from within Dynamics Navision visible within the Pentaho Analyser:

http://www.millersoft.ltd.uk/navision-pentaho.mov

Architecture Workshop

£10,000 Ex. VAT
• 3 days onsite
• Tailored to your company requirements
• Covering:

- Cube design and implementation
- ETL design and implementation
- Database turning to support OLAP analysis

Production Installation Quick Start

£6,500 Ex. VAT
• 3 days onsite
• Server Installation
• Database configuration
• 1 ETL example with line data
• 1 Cube example with line data
• 1 Report example with line data
• 1 Dash board example with line data

Checkpoints
Each remote session is:

£1000 Ex. VAT
• Checkpoints are 4h remote sessions
• Sessions given on T&M basis
• Average 2 week lead time
• Sessions:

-Performance Checkpoint
-Installation & Configuration Checkpoint
-Security Checkpoint
-Content Authoring Checkpoint
-Architecture Checkpoint

Pentaho “72-Hour Agile BI Challenge”

£3,000 Ex. VAT
• Targeted at Business User / Analyst
• Concept

- Includes 30-day hosting
- Price: can be credited towards subscription

Training Extreme

£5,000 Ex. VAT
• Day 1: Pentaho Data Integration Tool, dynamically create cubes and deploy to server
• Day 2: Generating reports and graphs from cubes and deploy to standard dashboard
• Day 3: Cubes, schemas and MDX in more detail

Millersoft and Pentaho are gold sponsors of the 2010 Butler BI conference.

Millersoft has been working with Open Source Business Intelligence software for 5 years and delivers solutions to companies across Europe including; Skype, Air Menzies International and Regenersis.

Millersoft can deliver complete Business Intelligence solutions or train and mentor existing staff. We have particular experience working with ERP systems like Lawson/Movex, Ofbiz and Oracle EBS. However, Millersoft also helps companies build BI systems from scratch using any source of data.

Millersoft supports the full Pentaho stack, with long experience delivering integrated dashboards, reports and add-hoc OLAP analysis. We also have niche expertise integrating Excel Pivot Tables with Pentaho and running software within the Amazon cloud.

Millersoft also has extensive database experience and can advise clients on the best choice of database to meet the number crunching needs of high volume analytics. Currently, our company is exploring Hadoop integration within the Pentaho suite.

Within the space of 6 months, Millersoft has become a key Pentaho partner, selling and supporting Open Source solutions across different industry sections including; logistics, telecoms and retail.

Matt Casters,Founder, Project Lead, Pentaho Data Integration (ETL)
Richard Baldwin, Global Director of Channels
Julian Hyde, Mondrian Founder, Project Lead, Pentaho Analysis

Watch the Pentaho Data Integration Video

At the heart of both Pentaho and Jaspersoft is powerful open source OLAP engine called Mondrian, which enables OLAP capabilities on top of any database. Using this tool you can create Pivot Tables to splice and dice terabytes of data without the huge costs associated with high end businesses intelligence applications like Cognos or Microstrategy.

Millersoft Ltd has long experience with Mondrian, running against both small and huge databases. If you need help realising its capabilities then give us a call.

Variety is the spice of life and a key characteristic of Open Source software, which makes choosing the most appropriate package far from obvious. Deciding which licence, vendor, version to pick can take longer than the problem you are trying to solve.

Thankfully, help is at hand as Millersoft Ltd can take your requirements and use our broad Business Intelligence experience to narrow down the options.

Millersoft Ltd can prepare working prototypes with your own data, demonstrating which open source choices work best for your business. For example, we could configure both JasperSoft and Pentaho to work against your company data held in Infobright or MySql. We can even compare the compare commercial and open source variants of those products and package everything up in a VMWare instance for ease of installation.

Millersoft Ltd can tailor open source business intelligence software to provide powerful market analysis of your customer base. Taking order and customer information from any accounting/ERP system, we can segment the customer base by recency, frequency and value. Showing the high/low value and repeat customers, allowing companies to target specific groups with a particular product or message.

We can show you how to prepare a campaign, extract a specific group for a mailshot and then measure the ROI of that campaign. Using standard open source tools like JasperSoft, Pentaho and Postgres, we can prepare powerful OLAP views of:

• Loyalty Attrition Analysis
• Customer life cycle analysis
• Source of Business By New V Repeat Customers
• Status by Customer Segment

Call us now to arrange a free demonstration

If your Extract Transform Load (ETL) diagram resembles an elevation of the Pompidou Centre then time to review your architecture. The more complex the ETL, the harder reconciliation becomes and the greater the risk that managers are basing decisions on duff data.

Creating reporting data marts from operational systems is seldom simple, especially with all those slowly changing dimensions to consider. This complexity can be reduced through judicious database selection, tool choice and a clear understanding of end-user requirements.

Millersoft Ltd can help streamline your integration strategy; loading data faster, making queries respond and reducing ongoing maintenance.

Millersoft Ltd likes to get involved with companies early in the project life cycle to ensure developers avoid some of the common BI pitfalls, however, we can also help with mature projects.

If your Pentaho or Jaspersoft Analysis Views are responding slowly or killing your database/server then Millersoft Ltd can tune your OLAP engine, with:

• Database architecture choice
• Database index selection
• Aggregate table definition
• OLAP schema design
• MDX query design
• Mondrian configuration
• Java performance tuning

In extreme circumstances we can even build custom versions of Pentaho/Jaspersoft, fine tuned to your data processing requirements.

We also provide support services to staff who are confident with the tools but need help with detailed technical questions from people with hands-on experience.

The new stand-a-lone version should be a boon for anyone using Postgres for OLAP as it will allow the database to utilise every CPU core. What follows are brief notes to enable users to create a VMWare build running with Jaspersoft (email for futher help or assistance and i’ll update this post):

You can download a copy here http://www.greenplum.com/single-node/

I used the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x / CentOS 5.x (x86 – 64bit) version

wget http://bitcast-a.v1.sjc1.bitgravity.com/greenplum/greenplum-db-3.3.4.0-build-8-SingleNo
deEdition-RHEL5-x86_64.zip

You can download a virgin copy of VMWare CentOS 5 here using a torrent client:

http://torrents.thoughtpolice.co.uk/centos-5.3-x86_64-server.zip.torrent

Remember to open ports 5432 and 8080 during the install

You need to increase your CPU and Memory settings for this VMWare appliance otherwise you will run out of resources

Create a linux user called gpadmin and set this user up so that they can login on the same box without a password, otherwise the installation process will ask you to login 100 times:

http://www.fnode.com/2009/09/how-to-enable-ssh-key-authentication-ssh-login-without-a-password/

Add your hostname to /etc/sysconfig/network

Mine is greenplumx

Add your IP address to /etc/hosts

Mine is 172.16.245.133  greenplumx

Restart networking

Follow the installation instructions for greenplum, a copy of my gp_init_config file is listed below

You can install the standard open source version of jaspersoft (jasperserver-3.5.0-linux-installer.bin) direct from source forge. You will need to run this against the default Mysql database for configuration as Greenplum has DML restrictions. Once installed you can then add in the Greenplum data source and start your analysis. Use this ant task to load the FoodMart demo data into Greenplum:

<target name=”CopyFoodmartFromFile”
description=”Runs a few queries.” >
<java classpathref=”project.classpath” classname=”mondrian.test.loader.MondrianFoodMartLoader” fork=”no”>
<arg value=”-verbose” />
<arg value=”-indexes” />

<arg value=”-jdbcDrivers=org.postgresql.Driver” />
<arg value=”-inputFile=FoodMartCreateData.sql” />
<arg value=”-outputJdbcURL=jdbc:postgresql://172.16.245.133/foodmart” />
<arg value=”-outputJdbcUser=gpadmin” />
<arg value=”-outputJdbcPassword=YOURPASSWORD” />
</java>
</target>

Copy of my gp_init_config file

# FILE NAME: gp_init_config

# A configuration file is needed by the gpinitsystem
# script to tell it how to configure the master and segment
# instances in your Greenplum Database system. This file can be named
# whatever you like, and is referenced when you run gpinitsystem.

################################################
# REQUIRED PARAMETERS
################################################

# A name for the array you are configuring. You can use any name you
# like. Enclose the name in quotes if the name contains spaces.

ARRAY_NAME=”Greenplum Database”

# This specifies the file that contains the list of segment host names
# that comprise the Greenplum system  the master host is assumed to
# be the host from which you are running the script. If the host list
# file does not reside in the same directory where the gpinitsystem
# script is executed, specify the absolute path to the file.

MACHINE_LIST_FILE=/home/gpadmin/single_host_file

# This specifies a prefix that will be used to name the data directories
# of the master and segment instances. The naming convention for data
# directories in a Greenplum Database system is SEG_PREFIX<number>
# where <number> starts with 0 for segment instances and the master
# is always -1. So for example, if you choose the prefix gp, your
# master instance data directory would be named gp-1, and the segment
# instances would be named gp0, gp1, gp2, gp3, and so on.

SEG_PREFIX=gp

# Base port number on which primary segment instances will be
# started on a segment host. If a host has multiple primary segment
# instances, the base port number will be incremented by one for each
# additional segment instance started on that host.

PORT_BASE=50000

# This specifies the data storage location(s) where the script will
# create the primary segment data directories. The script creates a
# unique data directory for each segment instance. If you want multiple
# segment instances per host, list a data storage area for each primary
# segment you want created. The recommended number is one primary segment
# per CPU. It is OK to list the same data storage area multiple times
# if you want your data directories created in the same location. The
# number of data directory locations specified will determine the number
# of primary segment instances created per host.
# You must make sure that the user who runs gpinitsystem (for example,
# the gpadmin user) has permissions to write to these directories. You
# may want to create these directories on the segment hosts before running
# gpinitsystem and chown them to the appropriate user.

declare -a DATA_DIRECTORY=(/dbfast1 )
# declare -a DATA_DIRECTORY=(/gp_primary /gp_primary)

# The host name of the Greenplum Database master instance.

MASTER_HOSTNAME=greenplumx

# The location where the data directory will be created on the
# Greenplum master host.
# You must make sure that the user who runs gpinitsystem
# has permissions to write to this directory. You may want to
# create this directory on the master host before running
# gpinitsystem and chown it to the appropriate user.

MASTER_DIRECTORY=/master

# The port number for the master instance. This is the port number
# that users and client connections will use when accessing the
# Greenplum Database system.

MASTER_PORT=5432

# The shell the gpinitsystem script uses to execute
# commands on remote hosts. Allowed value is ssh. You must set up
# your trusted host environment before running the gpinitsystem
# script. You can use gpssh-exkeys to do this.

TRUSTED_SHELL=ssh

# Maximum distance between automatic write ahead log (WAL)
# checkpoints, in log file segments (each segment is normally 16
# megabytes). This will set the checkpoint_segments parameter
# in the postgresql.conf file for each segment instance in the
# Greenplum Database system.

CHECK_POINT_SEGMENTS=8

# The character set encoding to use. Greenplum supports the
# same character sets as PostgreSQL. See ‘Character Set Support’
# in the PostgreSQL documentation for allowed character sets.
# Should correspond to the OS locale specified with the
# gpinitsystem -n option.

ENCODING=UNICODE

################################################
# OPTIONAL PARAMETERS
################################################

# Optional. Uncomment to create a database of this name after the
# system is initialized. You can always create a database later using
# the CREATE DATABASE command or the createdb script.

DATABASE_NAME=warehouse

################################################
# OPTIONAL PARAMETERS FOR SEGMENT MIRRORING
################################################

# Uncomment these parameters to set up mirroring at initialization.
# If you are using multiple network interfaces per segment host,
# do NOT set up mirrors at initialization time. Do so afterwards
# using gpaddmirrors

# The base port number on which mirror segment instances will be
# started on a segment host. If a host has multiple mirror segment
# instances, the base port number will be incremented by one for
# each additional mirror segment instance started on that host.
# Be sure to use a different number than the primary PORT_BASE.

#MIRROR_PORT_BASE=60000

# The data directory where mirror segment instances will be
# created on a host. There must be the same number of data directories
# declared for mirror segment instances as for primary segment instances
# (see the DATA_DIRECTORY parameter for more information).

# You must make sure that the user who runs gpinitsystem
# has permissions to write to these directories. You may want to
# create these directories on the segment hosts before running
# gpinitsystem and chown them to the appropriate user.

#declare -a MIRROR_DATA_DIRECTORY=(/dbfast3 /dbfast4)
#declare -a MIRROR_DATA_DIRECTORY=(/gp_mirror /gp_mirror)