Completed Draft for the "Pentaho Solutions" Book

Yes!

Last night, I completed the draft of "Pentaho Solutions", which is a book I'm writing together with my friend and colleague Jos van Dongen for Wiley.

(Actually, the full title is: "Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL")

Here's an overview of the contents, just to give you an idea what we have been doing:

• Part I: Getting Started, Prerequisites, Installation and Configuration and Overview
  
  
  • Chapter 1: Quick Start: Pentaho PCI Examples
  
  
  • Chapter 2: Prerequisites
  
  
  • Chapter 3: Server Installation and Configuration
  
  
  • Chapter 4: The Pentaho BI Stack
  
  


• Part II: Business Case, Dimensional Modeling, Data Warehouse and Data Mart Design
  
  
  • Chapter 5: Example Business Case: World Class Movies
  
  
  • Chapter 6: Data warehouse primer
  
  
  • Chapter 7: Modeling the Business: Logical Design using Star Schemas
  
  
  • Chapter 8: The Data Mart Design Process
  
  


• Part III: ETL and Data Integration
  
  
  • Chapter 9: Pentaho Data Integration
  
  
  • Chapter 10: Designing Pentaho Data Integration Solutions
  
  
  • Chapter 11: Deploying Pentaho Data Integration Solutions
  
  


• Part IV: Business Intelligence Applications
  
  
  • Chapter 12: The Metadata Layer
  
  
  • Chapter 13: Reporting using Jfree
  
  
  • Chapter 14: Scheduling, Subscription and Bursting
  
  
  • Chapter 15: OLAP Solutions using Pentaho Analysis Services
  
  
  • Chapter 16: Data Mining with Weka
  
  
  • Chapter 17: Building Dashboards
  
  

So - Jos and I will be processing comments from the copy and tech editors for the remainder of this month, and then, if all goes well this is going to result in a book with about 550 pages which should be available in the first week of September (2009). You can actually pre-order a copy already on Amazon and benefit from the special 37%(!) pre-order discount:

I admit that it has been way more work than I thought, and I'm very glad we have reached this milestone. That said, I really am quite happy with what we've written so far, and I am convinced we will be delivering a valuable book for everybody that is interested in getting started with Business Intelligence, or just Pentaho, or both. Although Jos and I did the writing, we got great support from Pentaho developers as well as various community members, and this really was a huge help to us. (I don't want to name names now because I would risk leaving someone out accidentally - We'll make sure to get a full list of acknowledgements)

As a project I think things have developed pretty good too. We experienced some delay with respect to our original schedule, but to be frank I expected that would happen when we started this. All in all, we are two weeks behind, but on a +6 months period of time, I don't think that's too bad. I really should mention that so far, we received excellent coaching and advice from our contacts at Wiley, Bob Elliot and Sara Shlaer. Thanks! and on to the last few bits of work...

Update: I forgot to mention - we are covering the new and upcoming version of the Pentaho platform, Pentaho 3. However, tools within the platform follow their own version scheme so a single version number doesn't say that much (for example, the data integration chapters focus on Pentaho Data Integration 3.2)

Writing a Book: Building Pentaho Solutions

Ok - this has been stewing for some time now, and I think now is the right time to announce that I am working together with Jos van Dongen from Tholis Consulting to create a book for Wiley with the tentative title "Building Pentaho Solutions".

My personal aim is to make this book the primary point of reference for DBAs and Application Developers that are familiar with Open Source products like MySQL and PostgreSQL but have no prior BI skills, as well as BI professionals that are familiar with closed source BI products like Microsoft BI and Business Objects that want to learn how to get things done with Pentaho.

The book will cover all distinct components and sub-products that make up the Pentaho BI Suite. For each component (and where applicable), installation, usage and maintenance are discussed and illustrated.

Background theory is given as needed to provide context for those readers with no prior BI knowledge or experience. This means we will cover topics such as dimensional modeling, data warehousing, data integration and much more. At the same time, the book will have a strong "hands-on" focus, and for that purpose, Jos and I have put together a fairly realistic online DVD Rental Company, www.worldclassmovies.com.

We went as far as creating different database schemas for the operational applications (for customer orders, inventory management, and purchase orders), and generating non-trivial volumes of example data for it (tables with 100k to 10m rows), covering over 7 years of DVD rental business - and this is just the operational system. And although generated, it's not just random data - things like customer age and location distribution, per year and per week ordering behaviour etc. - it's all in our sample data.

In our schemas and sample solutions, we are making an effort to cater to MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL users. We will also explore a few highly interesting open source database products like LucidDB and MonetDB.

Anyway - I will soon post some more details about the book and it's contents as we progress. I have taken Baron Schwartz's advice on writing a book to heart, and we are working from a pretty detailed outline trying to meet a darn-tight schedule.

If all goes well, we should end up with a 450-500 page book in a store near you by August 2009.

UPDATE:
Jos and I are in the final stages of writing the book. We will then have to process reviewer comments and set up the book's website (including all code samples).

We've had a few changes to our schedule. Instead of a 400-500 page book, it will be a 500-600 page book. It was due to be available late August, but this will now be Early September.

The book can be pre-ordered on Amazon. More information on the book can be found on the Wiley website

---

UPDATE2: The book is in print and available since late August 2009! So far, we've had a couple of very nice reviews.

The book is available directly from the Wiley site and also from Amazon. Wiley also provides an e-book. If the link to the e-book is not working or claiming the book is not available as e-book then you most likely ended up on the European version of the website. To fix that and order the e-book anyway, click the "choose location" link on the Wiley homepage, and set it to United States and try again.