Will Gorman’s Blog

Last week, the architects of Pentaho’s products convened in Orlando to sync up and discuss plans for 2008.  Matt Casters of Kettle, Julian Hyde of Mondrian, Thomas Morgner of JFreeReport, and Mark Hall of Weka attended the festivities.  Some of the highlights included roadmap discussions on Pentaho Metadata, a great Weka brown bag, and lots of discussion on improving communication and process as Pentaho scales its engineering department.

One aspect of the discussion included having Mondrian, our OLAP server, work more closely with Pentaho Metadata.  Over a year ago, Matt Casters wrote a prototype of a Mondrian Schema Generator based on Pentaho Metadata.  This functionality currently exists as an easter egg within Pentaho Metadata Editor, by clicking “CTRL-ALT-o”.  While brain storming, we’ve thought of many different ways that Metadata, Mondrian, and the Pentaho Platform can work together to make a better user experience.

Last week I checked in a substantial change to Pentaho’s Metadata MQL Query architecture, which allows for easier extensibility. Check out the new MQL Query architectural documentation over in our wiki. Pentaho’s Metadata Query Language (MQL) is an easy to use XML specification for querying a Business Model. By adding a factory class along with our default implementation of MQL, it is now much easier for a third party developer to quickly add functionality to MQL while maintaining the core capabilities we’ve already made available.

To learn more about Pentaho Metadata, check out our documentation and of course download the latest GA release, 1.6.0, over on SourceForge.net.