My horse does not run on petrol – is this a bug?

Yesterday I decided to refuel my horse carriage, and thus brought it to the petrol station. Shortly after filling up the horse with gasoline, the stupid thing died? Is this a bug?

In case you think: WTF?!: Every other day, we receive a posting in the forum that follows a similar pattern. Users download the Citrus-PRD, create reports with it, and then publish the report to an old (=not a Citrus-) BI-Server installation. And then they act surprised if that horse dies and if the report does not work.

So if you came to this site because I posted a link to here in the answer in the forum, then please remember:

BI-Server 3.0 was released in March 2009.

Citrus is scheduled to be released in September 2009.

March – September. Do you notice the six month gap?

If we would have a reporting engine that was able to do what Citrus-PRD can do, dont you think we would have included that in the march release? And the other way around: Back then in March, how would we know what the final Citrus release would look like, as it wasn’t even written yet. As long as the Church of Einstein is in power, time travel will remain forbidden, and thus we have to point out that:

The client-tools you use for developing content for the BI-Server must be the same version or older than the BI-Server version you use. Anything else violates the Einstein-rules and may bring you in deep trouble.

This entry was posted in Non-Technical Topics, Rants on by .
Thomas

About Thomas

After working as all-hands guy and lead developer on Pentaho Reporting for over an decade, I have learned a thing or two about report generation, layouting and general BI practices. I have witnessed the remarkable growth of Pentaho Reporting from a small niche product to a enterprise class Business Intelligence product. This blog documents my own perspective on Pentaho Reporting's development process and our our steps towards upcoming releases.

3 thoughts on “My horse does not run on petrol – is this a bug?

  1. Vaibhav Kumar

    Hi Tom,

    Where is this little tiny check box located in PRD 3.5 as described below

    —-
    Hidden Parameters

    By selecting a tiny little check-box, parameters can now be excluded from the UI-generation.

  2. jadz

    The fact that you are getting this many requests make me think you would be well served to put this information somewhere that is very visible to the end user.

    Also though your analogy is interesting, many of your users have used design or layout programs (like MS-Word 2000 and 2003, Corel Draw, Photoshop etc) where there is compatibility between versions.

    I can use Eclipse to edit against various versions server software and it still works etc…

  3. Thomas Morgner

    OK, I have it not tested, but I bet you wont have any success to open a Word 2003 document in Word 2000. If you then call up Microsoft to fix Word 2000 then you might get some rather funny reactions.

    It is a simple fact. If a program is released in the year 2000, then the developers cannot know anything about the implementation or file format of a program that will be written three years in the future.

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