Bens Blog

Last week I received one of the best letters in my life so far - beside the ones from Sarah of course ;-) : My one year work permit called Work & Travel 2009! With this permit I can work for one year from the moment I first arrive in Canada in March. Yesterday I also booked my flight to move to Canada. It will on March 17th so it's less than 3 months till I'll have to say "Good bye Germany"... The picture has nothing to do with this post. I just felt like posting it, I took it in Switzerland this summer.

The last weekend I discussed in a forum what my thesis is about. I spent some time in the answer, so why not posting it in my blog to give people a better idea what I'm working on: When users first see Palo and Pentaho, they don't really know there is such a big difference, both claim to be a BI suite. It was the same for me, when I first started my thesis. In my thesis I'm working with Palo OLAP Server, Palo Worksheet Server and also with Palo ETL Server compared to the Pentaho BI Suite (without Weka), otherwise it wouldn't be a good comparison. I created a test scenario, and try to provide a solution with both Palo and Pentaho. The focus of my thesis is not to say, Palo is good, Pentaho isn't or the other way around. the result might be "if you focus on planning, you better use Palo, if you do lots of reporting, Pentaho provides more options,... The scenario is more the practical side of an implementation: How to get data into the system (ETL), how can you de

For my masterthesis I had to figure out, how to use the action sequences as webservice with PHP. According to the documentation you can receive soap messages but the action sequences don't offer a WSDL that would help you building your client. I also had problems with the http basic authentication, that Pentaho uses. After a couple hours of research and try and error, I found a solution. I doubt thats the best way to go, but at least it works. All you need is the PEAR HTTP Request class. Here is the code: //PEAR Request require_once 'Request.php'; $response = $req->sendRequest(); if (PEAR::isError($response)) { echo $response->getMessage(); } else { $req->clearPostData(); $req->setURL("localhost:8080/pentaho/ServiceAction"); $req->addQueryString("solution", "bi-developers"); $req->addQueryString("path", "reporting"); $req->addQueryString("action", "Testreport.xact