Need a Mondrian .WAR? Check out XMondrian.

To whom it may concern, this is a quick note to bring the xmondrian project to your attention.

Introduction: Open Source OLAP, Mondrian, Pentaho, and JasperSoft

Mondrian is the open source OLAP engine. Mondrian provides:

• a multi-dimensional view of a relational database (ROLAP)
• a MDX query engine
• Clever, advanced caching layers to speed up OLAP query performance (making it a MOLAP/ROLAN hybrid i.e., HOLAP)
• Standards compliant OLAP data access by providing XML for Analysis (XML/A) and OLAP4J access APIs

Mondrian was designed and invented by Julian Hyde, who acted as technical and architectural lead of the Mondrian project for many years.

Mondrian was adopted by Pentaho, and is included in the Pentaho BI Stack as Pentaho Analysis Services. Mondrian is also the OLAP engine that ships with the Tibco/JasperSoft Reporting server, and with Meteorite BI's Saiku product.

Running Mondrian Standalone

While Pentaho, Jaspersoft and Meteorite all do a good job of integrating Mondrian inside their respective BI servers, some people would like to run only Mondrian directly in their java servers. The Mondrian project used to make that quite easy, since it shipped a .WAR (web-archive) file containing Mondrian itself, documentation, sample cubes, and the JPivot mondrian client.

Unfortunately, the Mondrian project stopped supporting the .WAR and sample content. This happpened a while ago already, but there are still people that are finding out about it only now. This might have to do with the fact that the Mondrian documentation has not been very well maintained and still refers to the .WAR as if it is part of the Mondrian project.

Introducing XMondrian

I felt the need to have a Mondrian .WAR myself. Main reason is that I created a couple of OLAP client tools myself, and I want to provide potential users with a quick and easy path to check them out. So, I decided to pack them all in a .WAR, together with Mondrian, the Foodmart Sample cube, and an embedded dataset.

The result is called xmondrian which you can find on github.

Getting started with XMondrian

Getting started with XMondrian is easy:

• Download the .WAR file
• Deploy to your java server. In theory, the process to do that will be dependent upon which webserver you are running. I tried with Apache Tomcat, Jetty, and Tiny Java Web Server, and for all these products you can simply copy the .WAR to the webapps directory
• Find the XMondrian homepage by navigating your browser to the xmondrian webapp. For example, suppose you installed Tomcat or Jetty locally, using the default port of 8080, then http://localhost:8080/xmondrian will bring you there.

What's inside XMondrian

Once you're on the XMondrian homepage, you can find more information about what's inside, but I'll summarize below:

• Mondrian 3.12
• A web.xml to instantiate and hook up the MondrianXmlaServlet. After installation of xmondrian, your webserver can receive XML/A requests via /xmondrian/xmla
• HSQLDB embedded database engine
• Sample Datasets and Schemas Both the Foodmart and Steelwheels datasets are included as embedded hsqldb database in a .jar file. There are predefined Mondrian Schema files for each dataset as well, which specify how these databases are mapped to cubes, measures, dimensions, etc. Finally, there are datasource files that tell mondrian to connect to the sample database and use the respective schema file
• xmla4js - A javascript XML/A client library. You can use this in browser-based web applications to communicate with Mondrian via the XML/A protocol. Xmla4js ships with code samples as well as API documentation
• Client Applications
  • XMLash - XML/A Shell: an interactive MDX command line interface for inspecting Mondrian schema objects, an for creating and running MDX queries. (See a demonstration )
  • Xavier - XML/A Visualizer: an interactive OLAP ad-hoc reporting and charting tool with a graphical user interface

The XML/A Shell Application

:

The XML/A Visualizer Application

:

Finally

I hope this post was useful to you. Please let me know how you get along with the xmondrian .WAR. I'm open to suggestions and I would love to collaborate to make xmondrian better. Please use the github issue tracker to provide your feedback. Thanks for your time and interest.

Running Pentaho BI Server behind a proxy

To whom it may concern - a quick hands-on guide for running the Pentaho BI server behind a proxy

Prerequisites

This post assumes you're running Ubuntu linux (or at least a Debian) and that you have both the apache Httpd server as well as the Pentaho BI server installed.

Apache HTTP Server

If you haven't got apache installed, this is your line:

$ sudo apt-get install apache2

You can then control the apache2 Http server using the apaceh2ctl script. For instance, to start it, do:

$ sudo apache2ctl start

Once it's started you can navigate to its homepage to verify that it is running:

http://localhost/

You can stop it by running

$ sudo apache2ctl stop

If you're changing apache's configuration, you need to restart it to allow changes to take effect using this command:

$ sudo apache2ctl restart

.

Java

Pentaho relies on Java. If not installed already you can get it like this:

$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

Pentaho BI Server

If you haven't got the Pentaho BI Server, download the latest version from sourceforge, and unpack the archive in some location you find convenient. (For development purposes I simply keep and run it in a subdirectory of my home directory)

You can start the pentaho BI Server by cd-ing into the biserver-ce directory and then run:

$ ./start-pentaho.sh

You can then navigate to its homepage:

http://localhost:8080/pentaho/Home

(Simply navigating to http://localhost:8080 will automatically redirect you there too).

It can be useful to monitor the log while it's running:

$ tail -f tomcat/logs/catalina.out

If you want to change something in Pentaho's configuration, you need to stop the server and then restart it. This is done by running:

$ ./stop-pentaho.sh

Configuring Proxy support for Apache

Boris Kuzmanovic wrote an excellent post to setting up proxy support for Apache. My summary (and adjustment) follows below.

First, change the apache configuration to load the required proxy modules:

$ sudo a2enmod proxy
$ sudo a2enmod proxy_http

Then, edit any site definitions to use the proxy. I just modified the default site definition:

$ sudo geany /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

Inside the <VirtualHost> section, I added these snippets immediately above the </VirtualHost> that ends the section:

    <Location /pentaho/>
      ProxyPass http://localhost:8080/pentaho/
      ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:8080/pentaho/
      SetEnv proxy-chain-auth
    </Location>

    <Location /pentaho-style/>
      ProxyPass http://localhost:8080/pentaho-style/
      ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:8080/pentaho-style/
      SetEnv proxy-chain-auth
    </Location>

After making these changes, we need to restart apache:

$ sudo apache2ctl restart

.

These two <Location> directives are now effectively tunneled to the respective locations on the Pentaho BI Server, and vice versa, the response is passed back.

Using mod_proxy_ajp instead of proxy_http

While the regular HTTP proxy simply works, there is a better, more thightly integrated solution. The regular HTTP proxy basically handles HTTP requests received by the Apache Httpd server by sending a new, equivalent HTTP request, through to the tomcat server. Likewise, Tomcat's HTTP response is then send back as a new equivalent HTTP response to the source of the original, initial request.

So, that's twice a transport over HTTP.

Things can be improved by routing the incoming HTTP request to the tomcat server using a binary protocol called the AJP (Apache JServ) protocol. (For a detailed comparison, see this excellent comparison between HTTP/HTTPS and AJP.)

Fortunately, the steps to setup an AJP proxy are almost identical to those for setting up a regular HTTP proxy. First, enable the ajp proxy module:

$ sudo a2enmod proxy
$ sudo a2enmod proxy_ajp

(Note that the proxy module was already enabled as part of setting up the regular http proxy. The line is repeated here for completeness, but not necessary if you completed the steps for setting up support for the regular http proxy. You can enable either or both the proxy_http and the proxy_ajp modules, and both require the proxy module.)

Then, we edit again the site configuration to use the proxy. Since the locations /pentaho/ and /pentaho-style/ were already used, we first comment those out:

    #<Location /pentaho/>
    #  ProxyPass http://localhost:8080/pentaho/
    #  ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:8080/pentaho/
    #  SetEnv proxy-chain-auth
    #</Location>

    #<Location /pentaho-style/>
    #  ProxyPass http://localhost:8080/pentaho-style/
    #  ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:8080/pentaho-style/
    #  SetEnv proxy-chain-auth
    #</Location>

Then we add equivalent lines going via the AJP proxy:

    ProxyPass /pentaho ajp://localhost:8009/pentaho
    ProxyPassReverse /pentaho ajp://localhost:8009/pentaho

    ProxyPass /pentaho-style ajp://localhost:8009/pentaho-style
    ProxyPassReverse /pentaho-style ajp://localhost:8009/pentaho-style

(The bit that goes ajp://localhost:8009 refers to the ajp service that is running on port 8009 of tomcat by default.)

Again we have to restart the apache service for the changes to take effect:

$ sudo apache2ctl restart

.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Paul Stöllberger, Pedro Alves and Tom Barber for valuable feedback and background information regarding AJP.