Mondrian, Apache Tomcat and MySQL – Installation and Configuration on Linux

In this post, I am going to walk you through a manual installation and configuration of Mondrian with Apache Tomcat 6. I have always believed to have a clean install from source and thus I am going to follow the same here as well. The following procedure is what I have used in our production and is thoroughly tested in Ubuntu, CentOS and RHEL. Please post your comments/suggestions if you find any flaws in this.

Step – 1: Installing Sun-JDK
There have been many a times that I have faced unknown and hard to debug problems with the default installations of Sun-JDK which comes with Ubuntu/RHEL and other Operating Systems. Specially in production systems, I feel much more comfortable compiling things myself and thus if you are planning to make deployments in production system, it is better that you know what you are installing and where.

Changing Columns to Proper Case in MySQL - Using InitCap() function

MySQL String functions have lots of capabilities to manipulate the columns the way you wish to display. But apparently MySQL does not have any inbuilt function to convert the string to Proper Case. Some people understand this term as Sentence Case or Capitalized. However, on MySQL Dev site I found this amazing function which is worth quoting since it does exactly that.

DELIMITER $$
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `initcap` $$
CREATE FUNCTION `initcap`(x char(30)) RETURNS char(30) CHARSET utf8
BEGIN
SET @str='';
SET @l_str='';
WHILE x REGEXP ' ' DO
    SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(x, ' ', 1) INTO @l_str;
    SELECT SUBSTRING(x, LOCATE(' ', x)+1) INTO x;
    SELECT CONCAT(@str, ' ', CONCAT(UPPER(SUBSTRING(@l_str,1,1)),LOWER(SUBSTRING(@l_str,2)))) INTO @str;
END WHILE;
RETURN LTRIM(CONCAT(@str, ' ', CONCAT(UPPER(SUBSTRING(x,1,1)),LOWER(SUBSTRING(x,2)))));
END $$
DELIMITER ;

Usage of this function would be as follows:-

- SELECT initcap('new delhi') returns "New Delhi"

Saving the article for my reference and for a lot of other people who might be looking for something similar.