Mondrian in Action: Open source business analytics

Summary

Mondrian in Action teaches business users and developers how to use Mondrian and related tools for strategic business analysis. You'll learn how to design and populate a data warehouse and present the data via a multidimensional model. You'll follow examples showing how to create a Mondrian schema and then expand it to add basic security based on the users' roles.

About the Technology

Mondrian is an open source, lightning-fast data analysis engine designed to help you explore your business data and perform speed-of-thought analysis. Mondrian can be integrated into a wide variety of business analysis applications and learning it requires no specialized technical knowledge.

About this Book

Mondrian in Action teaches you to use Mondrian for strategic business analysis. In it, you'll learn how to organize and present data in a multidimensional manner. You'll follow apt and thoroughly explained examples showing how to create a Mondrian schema and then expand it to add basic security based on users' roles. Developers will discover how to integrate Mondrian using its olap4j Java API and web service calls via XML for Analysis.

Written for developers building data analysis solutions. Appropriate for tech-savvy business users and DBAs needing to query and report on data.

What's Inside

• Mondrian from the ground up—no experience required
• A primer on business analytics
• Using Mondrian with a variety of leading applications
• Optimizing and restricting business data for fast, secure analysis

About the Authors

William D. Back is an Enterprise Architect and Director of Pentaho Services. Nicholas Goodman is a Business Intelligence pro who has authored training courses on OLAP and Mondrian. Julian Hyde founded Mondrian and is the project's lead developer.

Table of Contents

1. Beyond reporting: business analytics
2. Mondrian: a first look
3. Creating the data mart
4. Multidimensional modeling: making analytics data accessible
5. How schemas grow
6. Securing data
7. Maximizing Mondrian performance
8. Dynamic security
9. Working with Mondrian and Pentaho
10. Developing with Mondrian
11. Advanced analytics

William Back is an Enterprise Architect with Pentaho. He implements custom solutions using Mondrian as well as embedding and extending the system to meet the needs of a wide variety of industries. He also trains clients on the use of Mondrian and other Pentaho tools.

Nicholas Goodman is a Business Intelligence geek, consultant, hacker, blogger, speaker and entrepreneur. Nicholas founded and served as CEO of DynamoBI where he spent his days racing analytic databases and promoting LucidDB. He's worked on more than 50 Open Source BI customer implementations and has authored multiple training courses on OLAP, Mondrian, and Open Source BI.

Julian Hyde founded the Mondrian project in 2001. He continues as the project's lead developer, and as OLAP Architect at Pentaho. He has developed several database technologies over the years. He also has an active interest in emerging high-performance data management technologies and participates in several other open source projects.