Earlier this year, the open source community was shocked by a news noone had hoped to ever hear: Matt Casters had left Pentaho/Hitachi. Many data folks like me have grown up with “Mr. Kettle”, the Belgian guy that wrote lots of code and became an institution in the data integration sector.
So the good news is that Matt will be with us again this fall at the 11th Pentaho Community Meeting! And he will not only talk about Kettle aka Pentaho Data Integration but also about his new baby: Neo4j, a graph platform with a big community of graph database enthusiasts.
Matt, this is your first Pentaho Community Meeting outside of Pentaho/Hitachi. How does it feel?
I’m very proud of the work I did for Pentaho and I look towards the event with great anticipation. It will be great to see so many old and new friends.
Many people from the community had wondered where you would end up after leaving Hitachi. What are you doing at Neo4j and how is it connected to PDI/Kettle?
At Neo4j I have the title of Chief Solutions Architect and in that capacity I help build out everything possible needed to make Neo4j solutions a success, including data integration and best development and governance best practices. Kettle is a fantastic component in that architecture for both loading data into Neo4j as well as synchronizing graph data from Neo4j to other systems.
What will your talk be about?
Apart from building new connectivity for Neo4j I have been active in closing the gap in Kettle in terms of usability, debugging and life cycle management with what we think as ideal in the community. A bunch of plugins are being developed along with new streaming functionality to various platforms. I will cover all that in my talk.
“Ketteln” has become a German word describing the integration of data in a data warehouse using Kettle/PDI. What will happen with this project in Hitachi?
So far Pentaho and Hitachi have been great guardians of the project and I can only hope that this will continue. Regardless of this the Kettle community will continue to develop functionality in those areas where that is less the case 🙂
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