Preface

I joined Pentaho in 2011 with only a vague notion of business analytics or Mondrian and was told by my boss at the time that I should focus on becoming the Mondrian “expert” on the team. As I do when learning any new technology, my first action was to create a personal project to implement. In addition to my personal efforts, I was also assigned to support several clients dealing with Mondrian-related challenges.

As I started looking at the documentation and learning Mondrian, I quickly discovered that useful information was in multiple places, including the Mondrian site, forums, product websites, best practices, and even just in the heads of people who had been working with Mondrian for a while. To help myself, I began gathering notes together in one location and got the idea that a book on Mondrian would be very helpful.

After some encouragement from various friends and coworkers, I contacted Julian Hyde, who also recommended Nick Goodman for the project. Together we agreed that it was a good idea, so we started checking around for reputable publishers. Since I already had a shelf, both physical and virtual, full of Manning books, it wasn’t really a difficult choice.

This book is the work of the authors over the course of more than a year, but contains information created by multiple developers and communities over a decade. If you’re already using Mondrian, I hope you’ll find this a useful reference and learn a thing or two, particularly about the upcoming Mondrian 4.0. If you’re new to Mondrian, then I hope you’ll find this a useful learning tool that covers both the basics and advanced topics. No matter where you fall on the Mondrian knowledge scale, I hope you’ll find this book and the tools contained in it a useful aid in helping businesses make better decisions.

WILLIAM BACK