openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Daniel Reis <dgreis@xxxxxxx>]

David,

I've been using Pentaho Kettle with OpenERP for a few years now, so I'm
quite comfortable with what you can do with it.

> About Pentaho Kettle, I read HERE[1] that it has a GRAPHICAL TOOL  
> FOR ETL and can be used to update a database. This sounds for me  
> like a hot canditate for OpenUpgrade, especially to improve  
> usability and stuff

Since it's a graphical tool you can get the impression that it's "easier".
But as soon as you get to do more complex or extensive data handling, a GUI
starts being more a hurdle than a help.
And the transformations you design are not simpler nor more readable
compared to scripted code.


> I imagine a VM (probably even using vagrant boxes or docker) that  
> has a ready configured data migration server, where you can easily  
> manipulate ETL and stuff WITH A KIND OF INTEGRATION OF PANTAHO  
> KETTLE AND OPENUPGRADE-LOGIC, maintained and alimented with best  
> practices from github, making it easy easy easy to set up and share  
> migration pipelines for modules.

I think Kettle is an excellent tool than can aid you in a lot of data
integration tasks.
But I honestly don't think it would do a good task at OpenERP version upgrade.

For a "black box" upgrade you want to run a command on your server and  
let it do the magic for you.
That's a perfect job for scripts. And that's what OpenUpgrade is all about:
provide migration scripts for OpenERP modules.


> My general mission, I feel myself dedicated to within the community,  
> is usability and tearing down hurdles and inconveniences. Such  
> proposal would perfectly fit. I think people are just inherently  
> lazy, so if we could maximze convenience we could maximize  
> contribution and therefore probably momentum and quality of the  
> whole project.

As I mentioned before, I don't think Kettle would be a good choice here.
My suggestions on how you could contribute are:

* Write a good tutorial text to help people start with OpenUpgrade.
* Eventually, write a GUI program to wrap around the OpenUpgrade  
scripts, like what some programs do for bzr or git.


Keep up the enthusiasm and hope to see nice things from you soon :)

/DR