Alex Meadows - Pentaho Data Integration Cookbook Second Edition

Alex Meadows has worked with open source Business Intelligence solutions for nearly 10 years and has worked in various industries such as plastics manufacturing, social and e-mail marketing, and most recently with software at Red Hat, Inc. He has been very active in Pentaho and other open source communities to learn, share, and help newcomers with the best practices in BI, analytics, and data management. He received his Bachelor's degree in Business Administration from Chowan University in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, and his Master's degree in Business Intelligence from St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

First and foremost, thank you Christina for being there for me before, during, and after taking on the challenge of writing and revising a book. I know it's not been easy, but thank you for allowing me the opportunity. To my grandmother, thank you for teaching me at a young age to always go for goals that may just be out of reach. Finally, this book would be no where without the Pentaho community and the friends I've made over the years being a part of it.

Adrin Sergio Pulvirenti was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1972. He earned his Bachelor's degree in Computer Sciences at UBA, one of the most prestigious universities in South America.

He has dedicated more than 15 years to developing desktop and web-based software solutions. Over the last few years he has been leading integration projects and development of BI solutions.

I'd like to thank my lovely kids, Camila and Nicolas, who understood that I couldn't share with them the usual video game sessions during the writing process. I'd also like to thank my wife, who introduced me to the Pentaho world.

Mara Carina Roldn was born in Esquel, Argentina, in 1970. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at UNLP in La Plata; after that she did a postgraduate course in Statistics at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) in Buenos Aires city, where she has been living since 1994.

She has worked as a BI consultant for more than 10 years. Over the last four years, she has been dedicated full time to developing BI solutions using Pentaho Suite. Currently, she works for Webdetails, one of the main Pentaho contributors. She is the author of Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration: Beginner's Guide published by Packt Publishing in April 2010.

You can follow her on Twitter at @mariacroldan.

I'd like to thank those who have encouraged me to write this book: On one hand, the Pentaho community; they have given me a rewarding feedback after the Beginner's book. On the other side, my husband, who without hesitation, agreed to write the book with me. Without them I'm not sure I would have embarked on a new book project.

I'd also like to thank the technical reviewers for the time and dedication that they have put in reviewing the book. In particular, thanks to my colleagues at Webdetails; it's a pleasure and a privilege to work with them every day.

Wesley Seidel Carvalho got his Master's degree in Computer Science from the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, University of So Paulo (IME-USP), Brazil, where he researched on (his dissertation) Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Portuguese language. He is a Database Specialist from the Federal University of Par (UFPa). He has a degree in Mathematics from the State University of Par (Uepa).

Since 2010, he has been working with Pentaho and researching Open Data government. He is an active member of the communities and lists of Free Software, Open Data, and Pentaho in Brazil, contributing software "Grammar Checker for OpenOffice - CoGrOO" and CoGrOO Community.

He has worked with technology, database, and systems development since 1997, Business Intelligence since 2003, and has been involved with Pentaho and NLP since 2009. He is currently serving its customers through its startups:

Daniel Lemire has a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in Engineering Mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique and the Universit de Montral. He is a Computer Science professor at TELUQ (Universit du Qubec) where he teaches Primarily Online. He has also been a research officer at the National Research Council of Canada and an entrepreneur. He has written over 45 peer-reviewed publications, including more than 25 journal articles. He has held competitive research grants for the last 15 years. He has served as a program committee member on leading computer science conferences (for example, ACM CIKM, ACM WSDM, and ACM RecSys). His open source software has been used by major corporations such as Google and Facebook. His research interests include databases, information retrieval, and high performance programming. He blogs regularly on computer science at http://lemire.me/blog/.

Coty Sutherland was first introduced to computing around the age of 10. At that time, he was immersed in various aspects of computers and it became apparent that he had a propensity for software manipulation. From then until now, he has stayed involved in learning new things in the software space and adapting to the changing environment that is Software Development. He graduated from Appalachian State University in 2009 with a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science. After graduation, he focused mainly on software application development and support, but recently transitioned to the Business Intelligence field to pursue new and exciting things with data. He is currently employed by the open source company, Red Hat, as a Business Intelligence Engineer.