OpenOffice Recovery Takes Forever ?

OpenOffice.org is a very good alternative productivity application suite to Microsoft Office in terms of features and it has a rapid speed of development from open source community worldwide.

I use Calc - the spreadsheet application in the suite - extensively in my daily activities to analyze data subsets in data warehousing projects and proved to be very helpful. But the drawback of using this application is that you have to use it as it is - no point to have much complaints. But now I'm facing the stability and reliability issue that almost drive me nuts - an unstopable recovery process.

If you have a document that is recognized as a damaged one by OpenOffice you will be shown a dialog to recover it. And if you agree to recover it, almost only few of the times it behaves nicely .


But if you are unlucky enough then this process will take forever without any clue to be stopped in hand. I face it now... and even restarting my system several times didn't bring any good. Then I got this helpful page by googling and it relief me from the problem.

If you have the same issue, try this :

• If you are on Windows environment, delete Documents and settings/username/Application data/Openoffice.org2/user/registry/data/org/openoffice/Office/Recovery.xcu file.
• And if you are a Linux user, delete /home/username/.openoffice.org2/user/registry/data/org/openoffice/Office/Recovery.xcu

Done.

Till next article...

Feris

MS AS 2000 and MySQL ODBC Problem

Recently, I'm using MySQL as OLAP data staging and development database server for one of my clients which use Microsoft Analysis Server 2000.

I encountered problem with recent MySQL ODBC driver (5.1) from MS AS 2000 trying to get list of tables from MySQL DSN data source.

I then download and install an older version of MySQL driver (3.51) and set new ODBC DSN and finally have it recognized by MS Analysis Server 2000.

Hope this experience may help some of you who need to do the same thing as I did.


Feris Thia

Mondrian 3.0.4 Patch Release

Pentaho has released a bug fix release Mondrian 3.0.4 on August 2nd 2008. For those of you who has implemented Mondrian 3.0.4 are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

You can download the latest release at sourceforge. For release note click here.

MDX in Mondrian

Introduction

MDX (Multidimensional Expression) is a language construct to query OLAP cubes. It is much like SQL is a language construct to query relational database.

MDX was an initiative of Microsoft as part of the OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) specification in 1997. Mosha Pasumansky is one of the architects of the language. MDX was soon implemented by many OLAP vendors as their standard OLAP query language including Mondrian.

With MDX you can query a selection of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) data, doing some calculations, and retrieving meta data properties.

Example of simple MDX query is shown below :

select {[Measures].[Unit Sales]} ON COLUMNS,
{[Product].[All Products]} ON ROWS
from [Sales]
where [Time].[1997]

This will query from "Sales" cube a "Unit Sales" measure value from "All Products" dimension that happened in 1997. You can try it against Foodmart sample database.

Mondrian has implemented many of standard MDX expressions supported in MS Analysis Server. You can find a detailed of the expression here.

MDX entry in Mondrian JPivot's Sample

You can type your MDX query in JPivot JSP page in two ways :

• Type it under jp:mondrianQuery tag
• Type it under MDX editor
  

Using MDX Editor

• Start your Mondrian OLAP server
• Browse to one of your sample JSP file, for example "JPivot pivot table"
• Click on MDX button in the above page toolbar, it will show up an MDX Editor
• Type the previous sample MDX query here, and click Apply button
  
  
  
• You will now have a new slice and dice table view of that MDX query
  
  
  

More Resources




Check on the following web resources for more information about MDX :

• Mondrian's MDX Documentation
• Mosha Pasumansky
  
• Microsoft MDX Reference
• MDX Calculation Sample
• Nicholas Goodmans's Blog