Appendix B. Online resources

As an open source tool, Mondrian has an active online community and resources. This appendix contains links and descriptions for many resources you can use to continue to learn and use Mondrian.

Table B.1. Mondrian and OLAP

Site	Link	Description
Mondrian	http://mondrian.pentaho.com	Documentation and links to the Mondrian source.
Mondrian schema reference	http://mondrian.pentaho.com/documentation/xml_schema.php	Reference guide to each XML element in Mondrian’s schema.
Mondrian source	http://github.com/pentaho/mondrian	Mondrian source code repository with the latest versions.
Mondrian office hours	http://mng.bz/8tYc	Hours for Mondrian IRC chats with Julian Hyde and others.
Mondrian in Action	http://www.manning.com/mondrianinaction	Information about the book and links to the forums.
Mondrian in Action Forum	http://www.manning-sandbox.com/forum.jspa?forumID=823	Discussion forum for Mondrian in Action.
olap4j	http://olap4j.org	Documentation for olap4j and links to download the source.
XMLA for Analysis (XMLA) via MSDN	http://mng.bz/3oEo	Microsoft’s XMLA site. Probably the best reference site for XMLA.
xmla4js	https://github.com/rpbouman/xmla4js	Documentation and code for xmla4js.

Table B.2. Pentaho resources

Site	Link	Description
Pentaho	www.pentaho.com	Pentaho’s main site.
Pentaho community	http://community.pentaho.com	Pentaho’s community site with links to related projects, documentation, and source.
Pentaho source	http://source.pentaho.org/	Pentaho’s open source page. Note that much of the code is being migrated to GitHub.
Pentaho forums	http://forums.pentaho.com/	Pentaho forums that are a good source of past questions and online help.
Pentaho InfoCenter	http://infocenter.pentaho.com/	Primary source of Pentaho Enterprise documentation. Most is relevant to the Community Edition as well.
WebDetails, a Pentaho Company	www.webdetails.pt	Maker of C-Tools.
Saiku	http://analytical-labs.com	Saiku software.
Pivot4J	http://mysticfall.github.com/pivot4j/	JPivot replacement.

Table B.3. Blogs of interest

Author	Link	About the author
Julian Hyde	http://julianhyde.blogspot.com	Lead architect for Mondrian and one of the authors of this book
Luc Boudreau	http://devdonkey.blogspot.com	Lead engineer for Mondrian at Pentaho
Nick Goodman	www.nicholasgoodman.com/bt/blog/	One of the authors of this book
Bill Back	http://billonbi.wordpress.com	Director of OEM Services at Pentaho and one of the authors of this book

Table B.4. MDX resources

Site	Link	Description
Mondrian online MDX documentation	http://mondrian.pentaho.com/documentation/mdx.php	The definitive resource to Mondrian MDX support. Provides the functions, their signatures, and a brief description of each function. Also covers the known divergences from the XMLA specification and Microsoft’s MDX implementation.
Microsoft MDX language reference	http://mng.bz/47m0	The most comprehensive online resource for MDX. Covers language basics (operators and so on) and has an extensive function reference. Much of the documentation can be used as is, with no adjustment for MSFT versus Mondrian specifics. MSFT diverges from the specification frequently, so not all functions and documentation apply, but most do.
Fast Track to MDX by Mark Whitehorn, Robert Zare, and Mosha Pasumansky (Springer, 2005)	http://amzn.com/1846281741	An introductory, and dated, book on MDX. If MDX looks like gibberish and you want to understand the basics, this is a good book to start with.
MDX Solutions by George Spofford et al. (Wiley, 2006)	http://amzn.com/0471748080	Covers MDX extensively, providing huge numbers of practical exercises. Chapter 7 in particular is a gold mine of recipes for doing interesting things in MDX. Most of the MDX works as is or with minor adjustments, because this book was written for Microsoft instead of Mondrian.
Chris Webb’s blog	http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/category/mdx/	MDX trainer and guru Chris Webb has lots of posts on MDX. He’s into all Microsoft BI technologies, so you’ll find many other topics in addition to MDX, but he has some solid info on MDX (check out his older entries).