Acknowledgments

We’d like to thank the staff at Manning who helped make this book a reality. First, Bert Bates patiently taught us the fundamentals of telling a story, rather than simply writing dry, technical prose. Nick Chase helped with the technical aspects, fixing errors and answering basic questions that helped move the project along. Immense thanks to Susanna Kline, who not only made the book of much higher quality and guided us through the process, but also kept us going when we didn’t want to. Without Susanna’s assistance, we’d still be back somewhere in chapter 3, talking about how we should be writing more. A good editor makes a finished product possible. Finally, thanks to the marketing and production teams at Manning for their support, guidance, and encouragement throughout the publication process.

Though it’s impossible to list everyone who provided input, we’d specifically like to thank Anthony DeShazor, Will Gorman, and Luc Boudreau for support and guidance as well as technical and operational insights. The Saiku team, and their lead Paul Stoellberger, were very helpful in testing Mondrian 4.0 and ensuring accurate content for this book. Thank you to Kevin Hanrahan who, although new to Mondrian, worked through examples and provided feedback on errors and omissions. We’d also like to thank the management of Pentaho for being supportive of this effort and allowing us to reuse some internal Pentaho content. Thank you also to our colleagues and friends at Pentaho and in the Pentaho and Mondrian community for creating such a great set of technology and tools.

We’d like to thank the reviewers who took time to read the drafts of our manuscript and provide feedback so that we could make the book easier to read and understand. Many a poorly written section or so-so graphic was improved by input from our reviewers: Aiden Humphreys, Alexander Helf, Barry Polley, Dan McCreary, Filip Rembiałkowski, Garry Turkington, Greg Soulsby, Lorenzo De Leon, Marc-Steffen Kaesz, Mark Newman, Marko Viitanen, Matt Taylor, Nadia Noori, Najib Coutya, Owen Kaser, Ron Steiger, Saeed Alhajyousef, Salvatore Piccione, and Simon (Zihong) Wang. Thanks also to David Fombella Pombal and Gavin Whyte for their careful technical review of the final chapters shortly before they went into production.

William Back

You always read about how much work writing a book is and how it takes a team. The reality of that fact didn’t hit me until I attempted to write a book of my own. My first clue that I was taking on a large project should’ve been when former authors told me what a great idea it was, but declined to participate. It’s a lot of work, and it does take a lot of help.

I have to first thank my wife, Tara, and my children, Lauren and Nathan. They’ve been very patient in allowing me to spend hours and weekends locked away in my office or talking with my coauthors. Family support is a must because of the time it takes to write a book.

I also want to thank my coauthors, Julian Hyde and Nick Goodman. They had much more experience and background with past versions of Mondrian and provided a lot of insight into how Mondrian can and should be used. The Mondrian 4.0 features in this book would’ve been impossible to include without Julian’s knowledge of the latest version.

Nicholas Goodman

It’s easy to wonder why anyone would write a book at all; it’s immensely time-consuming, requires more effort than anyone thinks or knows, and can be downright frustrating. This book, however, is something I’m proud to have been a part of, and it certainly would not have happened by me alone.

Julian Hyde is a long-time colleague and friend, and I’m grateful we were able to work on this project together. His efforts shepherding Mondrian over the course of a decade are commendable, and his talents numerous. I’m honored that he and Bill asked me to play a small part as coauthor on this much-overdue project.

Bill Back is the heart and soul of this book! His desire to learn, explore, perfect, communicate, and teach are all present, and in no uncertain terms this book wouldn’t have made it past a proposal had it not been for his desire to do this project well. If there were a way to make Bill’s name 10x the size of mine on the cover, he’d deserve all that extra credit and more!

To my wife, Kathleen, who listened to me complain and wondered why I ever took on this project, but still encouraged me to just “go work on the book for a couple hours” here and there—you are the only reason the team at Manning received any content from me. To my daughter, Emmeline, who was born during the final days of this book—you’ll be glad to know that daddy was doing something productive during those middle-of-the-night sessions!

Julian Hyde

I once said I’d never bet my job on a technology about which no one had seen fit to write a book. Thankfully the Mondrian community isn’t as conservative as me! Over the past decade, many people have used Mondrian successfully based on information gleaned from forums, the developer mailing list, and the less-than-perfect online documentation. You’ve helped each other out, and inspired the developers to make Mondrian faster and better. This book is the culmination of a long journey, and is my way of saying thank you for your patience and support.

Mondrian is an open source project, but its chief inspiration was a commercial product: Microsoft Analysis Services. Its architects—Amir and Ariel Netz and Mosha Pasumansky—radically simplified OLAP. Their product had a query language, MDX, and standard interfaces OLE DB for OLAP and XML/A, where all previous products had required building queries using a proprietary API. Their hybrid architecture combined the convenience of ROLAP with the performance and expressive power of MOLAP. Mondrian wouldn’t have been possible without their work creating standard languages, APIs, and architectures.

Every open source project is part of a wider movement. Thank you to all open source software developers out there. We use your software every day for development, debugging, builds, and testing, and you probably don’t even know it.

Mondrian has a number of crucial “sister projects”; we literally grew up together. The first, JPivot, started when Andreas Voss flew from Germany to meet me in San Francisco. His company wanted to develop a web-based pivot table; they would build it on top of my fledgling Mondrian project and release it open source if I made sure that Mondrian had the features they needed. We shook hands, and that was that. Other projects followed: LucidDB (John Sichi, Rushan Chen, Zelaine Fong); LucidEra Clearview, which became Pentaho Analyzer (Benny Chow); olap4j (Luc Boudreau and Barry Klawans); OpenI (Sandeep Giri); Saiku (Paul Stoellberger and Tom Barber); and CTools (Pedro Alves).

Many people have contributed code to Mondrian, and I’m grateful to them all. We grow best and fastest when developers and architects bring challenging problems, and work with us to solve them. So, thanks to Joe Barnett, Marc Berkowitz, Roland Bouman, Matt Campbell, Matt Casters, Gang Chen, Dan Dosch, Daniel Einspanjer, Richard Emberson, Sarah Gerweck, Will Gorman, Brandon Jackson, Sean McCullough, Eric McDermid, Gretchen Moran, Thomas Morgner, Henry Olson, Kurt Walker, and Sherman Wood.

Open source BI wasn’t always with us. Mark Madsen, Seth Grimes, Nicholas Goodman, James Dixon, and Jos van Dongen explained to the world how open source BI, and in particular Mondrian, could change business. And I’d like to thank Richard Daley and the whole Pentaho team for their faith and investment in Mondrian and open source BI technology.

Writing a book is hard work. Thank you to my coauthors, Bill and Nick, and to our editor Susanna Kline, for their insight, stamina, and patience. And thank you to my brother Justin and my friend Gordon Cameron, who were always happy to discuss dimensional modeling over a beer or two at Barclay’s pub. You helped keep me sane.

Building a piece of technology, and now writing a book, requires commitment and sacrifice, not just from the author, but from his family, who are rarely asked or thanked. My son, now 4, has learned the pattern from his mother: yesterday he said, “Are you going to work at your computer again tonight, Daddy?” Thank you to my wife, Pamela, for everything; and to my sons, Sebastian and Theodore, who will love reading their names in print.