Pentaho - Business Intelligence

File Release Notes and Changelog

Release Name: 1.7.0-stable

Notes:
Pentaho® BI Suite, Release 1.7.0

**Introduction**

Thank you for choosing the Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.7.0. The Pentaho Open BI
Suite is delivered with a centralized metadata layer, which enables IT
professionals to create reusable business definitions for business-user
reporting, while abstracting users from the underlying structure and
complexity of corporate applications and databases. Pentaho's BI metadata
layer is based on the Common Warehouse Model (CWM) standard to simplify and
streamline integration with existing metadata-driven applications.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

**Contents**

  * What is Included in this Release?

  * System Requirements

  * What is New in this Release?

  * Known Issues in this Release

  * Frequently Asked Questions

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

**What is Included in this Release**

This release includes the complete Pentaho BI Suite, the Pentaho BI Platform
server, and all client design tools as described in the list below:

BI Server 1.7.0

The BI Platform is an enterprise-class Business
Intelligence (BI) platform that supports Pentaho's end-user reporting,
analysis, and dashboard capabilities with back-end security, integration,
scheduling, and workflow capabilities.

Management Services Console 1.7.0

The Management Services Console
is a standalone utility distributed with the Subscription Edition of the BI
Platform with a thin-client interface that enables you to configure and
administer one or more Pentaho deployments.

Design Studio 1.7.0 

The Pentaho Design Studio is a collection of editors and viewers integrated
into a single application that provides a graphical environment for building
and testing Action Sequence documents.

Metadata Editor 1.7.0 

The Metadata Editor (PME) is a tool that
builds Pentaho metadata domains and models. A Pentaho metadata model maps the
physical structure of your database into a logical business model.

Report Designer 1.7.0 

The Report Designer is the primary tool for
creating and publishing Pentaho Reports. It provides a graphical interface
allowing users to connect to their data, design and preview reports, and
publish the reports to the Pentaho BI Platform.

Data Integration 3.0.2 

Integration delivers powerful Extraction,
Transformation, and Loading (ETL) capabilities using an innovative, metadata-
driven approach.

Schema Workbench 2.3.x 

The Schema Workbench offers a user interface
to design, edit, and publish Pentaho Analysis (Mondrian) OLAP schemas, without
having to hand-edit XML.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

**System Requirements** 

Below are detailed system requirements for each Pentaho
component included in this release:

BI Server

* 1.8 GHz Processor
* 2 GB RAM
* 400 MB
* Sun v 1.5 (5.0)

Report Designer

* 1.8 GHz Processor
* 256 MB RAM
* 100 MB
* Sun v 1.5 (5.0)

Design Studio

* 1.8 GHz Processor
* 256 MB RAM
* 200 MB
* Sun v 1.5 (5.0)

Metadata Editor

* 1.8 GHz Processor
* 256 MB RAM
* 100 MB
* Sun v 1.5 (5.0)

Data Integration

* 1.8 GHz Processor
* 512 MB RAM
* 180 MB
* Sun v 1.5 (5.0)

Schema Workbench

* 1.8 GHz Processor
* 512 MB RAM
* 50 MB
* Sun v 1.5 (5.0)


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

**Special Considerations**

  * The Pentaho BI Platform and all tools require JVM 1.5; JVM 1.6 is not
supported at this time.


  * Pentaho client tools require same version of the BI Platform. For example,
to use Report Designer 1.7 you must be running Pentaho BI Platform 1.7.


  * MS Word, RTF, PDF and MS Excel outputs created by the Pentaho Report
Designer require the appropriate desktop software such as Adobe Acrobat Reader
and Microsoft Word or Excel display correctly.

* If you are accessing the Pentaho BI Server remotely, you must edit the web.xml file, 
(located under \bi-server\tomcat\webapps\pentaho\WEB-INF), so that samples execute 
correctly:

<context-param>
     <param-name>base-url</param-name>
     <param-value>http://localhost:8080/pentaho/</param-value>
</context-param> 

Change http://localhost:8080 to reflect the correct host name and port.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

**What is New in this Release?**

This release is focused on addressing defects and upgrading each of the pillar
engines (Mondrian, Pentaho Reporting, Kettle) to their latest stable release:

  * Mondrian 3.0

  * Reporting 0.8.9.4

  * Kettle 3.0.3

Reporting

Report designers can now build reports that contain Multi (Bar-
Line), Bubble, Scatter, and XY charts. See details under "More on
Reporting."

BI Server (Platform/PCI)

Web users can now create new Analysis Views and
save them.

Schema Workbench

Administrators can now create Mondrian schemas and publish
them directly into the Pentaho solution repository.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

**More on Reporting**

Below are more details regarding enhancements to Pentaho Reporting:

Improved process for publishing a report to the Pentaho BI Server that gives
report designers:

  * The ability to pick the location to publish by browsing Solution
repository

  * The ability to choose a default output type or prompt the list of output
types

  * The ability to launch the report from the Pentaho BI Server after
publishing

Improved processes for calculation and formatting that gives report designers:

  * The ability to create simple or complex calculations directly on an
element field or to a new data field using Excel-like functions

  * The ability to set the formatting of an element conditionally (style
expressions) using Excel-like functions

  * The ability to create simple parameter prompts when report are launched on
the Pentaho BI server by adding tokens to any query

  * The ability to use added toolbar actions

  * The ability to change font type, font size, font style, font color of an
element

  * The ability to align the text in the element

  * The ability to add, edit, or remove a data source connection

  * The ability to copy and paste an element properties (font type, font size,
font style, font color, background, alignment, style expressions, and more) to
another element

  * The ability to easily align and size elements by using a grid option

  * The ability to select multiple report elements using rubber band selection

New Chart types include:

  * Bar Line

  * Bubble

  * Scatter

  * XY Area

  * XY Bar

  * XY Line

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

**Known Issues in this Release**

The following is a list of known issues in this release. Read it carefully
before installing the product:


|Bug| |Open| |Critical| |1.7.1.M1| |BISERVER-289| When a user is removed from
the system, their subscriptions must be manually removed.

|Bug| |Open| |Critical| |1.7.1.M1| |BISERVER-201| When exporting Analysis
views to PDF or Excel, chart does not display.

|Bug| |Open| |Severe| |1.7.1.M1| |BISERVER-1036| When executing a Data
Integration (Kettle) Job from the Pentaho platform, the FTPstep does not
work.

|Bug| |Open| |Severe| |1.7.1.M1| |BISERVER-1237| When using carriage returns
in the **Description** of an action sequence, fly over pop up which contains
options to **Run in Background** and **Subscribe** do not appear.

|Bug| |Open| |Severe| |1.7.1.M1| |BISERVER-1034| When using Oracle as the
data for Analysis cubes, generated drill through column names are too long due
to a limit in Oracle to 30 characters for identifier names.

|Bug| |Open| |Severe| |1.7.1.M1| |BISERVER-328| When dynamically building SQL
using INPUT parameters, the SQL Execute component does not handle PREPARE
statements.

|Bug| |Open| |Severe| |1.7.1.M1| |BISERVER-847| When executing parameter
prompting in sub actions, all prompts are aggregated into one prompt page.

|Bug| |Open| |Medium| |1.7.1.M1| |BISERVER-1411| All Pentaho samples were
originally designed to work with the SampleData database on Hypersonic or
MySQL. Some of the sampes in the SampleData database may not work on Oracle or
Postgres. To resolve the issue, update the SQL statements.

|Bug| |Open| |Medium| |1.7.1.M1| |BISERVER-1414| Developers using Pentaho
result sets as data in their application must change references from
**org.pentaho.core.connection.IPentahoResultSet** to
**org.pentaho.commons.connection.IPentahoResultSet** in their code.

|Bug| |Open| |Severe| |1.7.1.M1| |BISERVER-1069| When using MySQL as the
platform repository, the server loses connection to MySQL overnight (after
periods of inactivity) and the server has to be restarted. Use** c3p0** for
connection pooling to avoid the problem (see **_Note_** below).

**_Note**_: For more information, see forum post:  Server Loses Connection to
MySQL (http://forums.pentaho.org/showthread.php?t=54939&highlight=c3p0&page=5)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

** Frequently Asked Questions **

Can you explain the differences among the Pentaho releases in terms
of support?

On the customer support portal, you may find various folders and files with
different release information. The table below describes the release versions:

**GA** -- Fully supported in production and development environments|

**Release Candidate (RC1, RC2, and so on)** -- Fully supported in production and
development environments. If a GA becomes available, and the reported issue
does not occur in the GA version, customers are required to upgrade to the GA
for support.|

**Milestone (M1, M2, and so on)** -- Developer assistance only

What is Pentaho Optimization?

As a subscription customer you have access to optimized versions of the
Pentaho JARs. Optimized JARs contain all of the same Pentaho classes as the
debugging versions, except the classes have been compiled differently. When
compiling the optimized classes, we turn debugging information off. We then
create a new set of JARs, the optimized JARs, using the optimized classes.

The result of Pentaho's optimization is that the optimized JARs are comprised
of fewer bytes than the debugging jars. First, this means that an optimized
version of Pentaho takes less space on your hard drive. Second, having fewer
bytes means that there is less information for the JVM to process, thus
performance improves.

Do I still need the debugging JARs?

If disk space is not a problem and you have not experienced any performance
problems, then you don't need to use the optimized jars. Additionally, when
you are in development, before moving to production, we suggest that you use
the debugging jars, since they are packaged with the classes that contain
valuable debugging information for your developers and the pentaho support
team.

Should I use a Preconfigured Installation?

The Preconfigured Installation (PCI) allows you to get up and running in a
matter of minutes because it contains everything you need to begin using the
Pentaho Platform:

  * JBoss application server

  * Data source and connectivity files configured for an RDBMS running on
localhost

  * Pentaho sample solution repository

  * Pentaho sample data scripts for an RDBMS repository

  * Management Services Console

Using the Management Services console, you can configure the connection
information for the PCI's data sources to match your existing databases.If you
decide to use a PCI, you can find the different configurations in the
following directory:

1.7.0 -> Developers -> Server -> NIX -> OSX -> Windows

Should I perform a manual deployment of Pentaho?

A manual deployment of Pentaho refers to deploying the Pentaho Web Application
to an existing application server such as Tomcat or JBoss. If your
organization already has JBoss or Tomcat installed, and you are required to
use this existing application server, then you should perform a Pentaho manual
deployment. Other supported J2EE Java Application Servers are listed in the
Support Matrix (http://wiki.pentaho.org/download/attachments/2131196/1_6_Support_Matrix.pdf?version=1).

The **pentaho-se-deployments** package allows you to build the Pentaho Web
Application archive configured to run in your environment:

  * JBoss or Tomcat

  * Hypersonic, MySQL5, PostgreSQL 8.2.x, or Oracle10g

  * Optimized or Debugging

When performing a manual deployment, you will be responsible for the
following:

  * An RDBMS of your choice configured for use with Pentaho

  * An existing **pentaho-solutions** directory

  * A Subscription Key

  * Appropriate database drivers installed on your Application Server

  * Data source connections defined in your Application Server

The **pentaho-se-deployments** package for manual deployments are located in
the following directory:

1.7.0 -> Server -> Windows -> NIX -> OSX

Can't I just use the Pentaho JARs?

You are free to use the Pentaho JARs in your own applications; however,
Pentaho cannot support your applications. Pentaho will support you in the
installation and configuration of the JARs in your application. If you are
interested in using Pentaho JARs in your application, you can find them at the
following location:

1.7.0 -> Developers

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Pentaho Corporation

Citadel International, Suite 340

5950 Hazeltine National Dr.

Orlando, Florida 33309 USA

407 812-OPEN (6736) 

http://www.pentaho.com/

**Readme Version 2.0**

Copyright © 2008 Pentaho Corporation

   


Changes: