Implementation Workshop: Metadata

"My users think I'm a God." , Matt Harbert, DivX

I had to start with that quote, I was so pleased to hear it during discussions over lunch this afternoon during the workshop. I was talking with a couple of classmates about Kettle, the Pentaho Data Integration tool, reveling in stories of leaping tall buildings with Kettle as my booster pack. From across the room, Matt tossed the aforementioned words of glory, and I thought "well, if that doesn't just sum it all up". Kettle really is that good, and you'll only know if you dive into it, because, of course, I am a Pentaho-an, making me slightly biased ;)

These were the topics of discussion that opened the Metadata module of the workshop. Metadata is another project being architected and driven by Matt Casters, founder of the Kettle project. Jake Cornelius led the module, and did a nice job of showing us the Pentaho metadata Editor, a handy tool that assists in building Pentaho metadata models. The Metadata Editor is not quite 2 months old, and from what we were shown, is proving to hold lots of potential. The core functionality is there, and the user interface is intuitive, once you learn the new jargon. Amidst a short array of funky behavior and a few bugs, the Metadata Editor's power shined through with it's ability to model not only mappings to physical tables, but also extended formulas, formatting and style properties in a hierarchical fashion (termed "concepts"), and internationalization functions.

This is the end of day one, time to pop over and visit the dev guys on my way home. I have a renewed sense of excitement today, partly because this training is turning out to be even better than I had expected (and my expectations were pretty high), and partly because I'm training up for a brand new seat on the Pentaho ride :)