Pentaho BI 101 - Getting Started Series

As part of the first series on the DWBI Pub channel on YouTube, I have started to cover the Pentaho BI getting started series. The motive is to help people scale up to Open Source technologies, learn and contribute to real world projects.

As part of the getting started series, I would cover all aspects of Pentaho Business Intelligence and then take each component at a time and help people learn and deliver on real world projects. I hope to share as well as increase my knowledge while working on this series.

You can subscribe to my channel as well as add the playlist to give you most updated information as I upload more videos.

Topics in the Series (Update: Jan 27, 2014)

1. Introduction Part 1
2. Introduction Part 2
3. CTools Installation

Need for Learn and Share in DWBI world

As open source technologies are maturing, I always feel that the resources available to learn are very dispersed which is why beginners who are not able to find the right mentors often find it hard to figure out where to start. The reason for this is simple. Most of the open source punters are often too occupied to learn and are not able to find time to share their learnings with the world.

While working as a Practice Lead and Architect at YoungSoft Inc., I always feel that there is interest in people to learn new technologies but often people like us are not free to train them or help them. Thus, I have created a channel on YouTube as DWBI Pub and have started sharing my knowledge with the world.

As part of my attempt to get more people aware about BI and related technologies, the first part of the video series involve getting started with Pentaho. Later I also plan to cover my encounters with Informatica, Big Data technologies like Hadoop, Hive etc., Visualization tools like Yellowfin and many others.

Another purpose of starting this channel is also to exchange knowledge with the best in the industry and have their valuable feedback and comments.

Please feel free to subscribe to my channel and leave your feedback.

DWBI Pub on YouTube - Beer Conversations about Data

Install Oracle Sun Java JDK on Linux

In this post, I would try and collate information about installing Sun Java JDK on various Linux platforms. Since the time licensing issues have come up, the distros have stopped shipping sun-java and thus we need to add additional repos to achieve the same. I have found a very diverse information with various methodologies how people have installed but none of them give a very holistic picture. Hope this post can become a one stop information for many people struggling out there to get the right information all at one place and thus would keep updating this post to add new and relevant information.

Installing Sun Java JDK on Ubuntu 10 and 11

## Install the package required for adding repositories 
deploy$ sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
deploy$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java
deploy$ sudo apt-get update
deploy$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
deploy$ sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

## Adding to environment Variable
deploy$ sudo vi /etc/environment
## Append the line - JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun"

Remote Desktop using VNC and FVWM Crystal

This is one of my favorite things. Most of the times, I do not like having a development environment on my own machine because of various constraints like RAM, OS etc. It also helps in environments when DB connections cannot be made over VPN and only internal servers can access them. Thus, for working remotely, this is the best practice. 

I have always followed a policy of creating an environment for myself on the development server and working on that. For this, sometimes I require to have a windows manager too. FVWM crystal serves as one of the best windows manager I have ever worked with. It is light weight, superfast over VPN and renders pretty nicely. 

Official documentation page from Ubuntu

Quick steps to get you setup for Ubuntu

## Installing VNC Server on Ubuntu and FVWM-Crystal

deploy$ sudo apt-get install vnc4server fvwm-crystal

## Starting VNC Server - You can give the geometry settings you like.
## Note that this is a normal alphabetical 'x' and not a multiply sign.
deploy$ vncserver -geometry 1200x800 

## For the first time, it would ask you for a VNC Password
## Please enter your desired password for logging into your remote machine.

## The above command would start the VNC server at 
## terminal :1 or :2 depending upon what is available. 
## To kill a particular port run
deploy$ vncserver -kill :1

Accessing the VNC Remote desktop

There are a variety of clients available but mostly on Mac and Windows I have used RealVNC and on Linux I have used Remmina. There are varied functionalities with these clients and you can choose according to what functionalities you would require.

To open the remote desktop, open the client and enter the URL in the format :. Here port is the terminal port on which the windows manager has got started when the above command of vncserver was given. For example 10.0.0.23:1. One you do this, you would be able to login to remote terminal using fvwm-crystal or any other default windows manager. If you have multiple windows manager, the suggestion is to edit the ".vnc/xstartup" which is there in your Home directory to configure it.

Important FAQ - If you are not able to access the remote machine, then your server might be blocking the VNC port. In such case, you would require to tunnel it to do the same. Follow the steps of Port forwarding in Ubuntu Documentation to achieve the same.

## Find out the remote port where VNC is running - Mostly 5900 or 5901
deploy$ netstat -tpln | grep -iR xvnc
## On your local system, create a tunnel
deploy$ ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 joe@remotehost

## Connect to remote machine from VNC client giving IP 
## of localhost as "localhost:5900"