Hello Crow

26 Apr 2015

So here it is, a blog by me. Over the years I’ve been coding (um… many, many too many years) I’ve relied heavily on the gems wonderful people have found the time to post. All along I’ve meant to start one myself. Hell, the world needs my genius. But maybe I’m just shy.

So today I decided to get to grips with this Jekyll thing that github.io uses for blogging and grabbed the simplest theme I could find. And here we are, up and running in minutes.

OK, so the colours are a bit stark. But then again, suitably crow-like. And you don’t want to see what happens when I try and get artistic.

What’s it all about?

Over the last year I’ve been getting the BI side of Claritum up-and-running. Previously we had a fairly expensive MicroTragedy around reporting. This time round we had a very limited budget, but at least I’d read up on data warehousing and thought I knew the direction we should take.

We settled on Pentaho. It’s open source and promised all the tools we would need in one place.

One key requirement that Pentaho doesn’t offer out the box is multi-tenancy - the ability to host multiple client’s data in a single instance: this lets a client report on their own data, but not see stuff from other tenants.

There isn’t a whole lot out there about how to do that, but we got there eventually.

I’m a back-end guy. I couldn’t tell you how to make a pretty dashboard if I tried. But maybe if I can brighten some of the codey nerdy bits, someone will give me biscuit.

So that’s what I’ll be writing about that to start with. If it goes well I’ll let rip with some other obsessions later.

You need help…

Indeedy. Get that thing out your pocket and point it over here. If the layout looks funny on your device, let me know in the comments below.