Bens Blog

After not writing much lately I think it's getting time to give a short update about how my immigration process is doing. I received my one year work permit already in December and I'm still waiting to become a permanent resident. I applied a couple months ago and at least since January they are working on it in the canadian embassy in Berlin. According to their website it can take over a year for them to decide, so I better don't expect an answer the next weeks and months. During the last few weeks I started applying at some companies, but answering emails isn't a strengths of most of them. I hope they serve their customers better. I usually call them about a week after, but often you end up in their phone systems without a chance getting the right person. It might be a bit easier when I actually live in Canada and can drive by to hand the resumes out to the right people. We'll see. At least we have a car already, Sarah bought a 2001 Chevrolet Cavalier last mont...

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...