Pentaho Community ~upd~ May 2026

It began with a baker named Elara in Lyon, France. Elara ran "Le Fournil des Cinq," a small chain of five artisanal bakeries. She loved the smell of sourdough but hated spreadsheets. Every Monday, she would spend six hours manually collating sales from her five shops, cross-referencing flour suppliers, yeast shipments, and the mysterious case of the missing almond croissants (which her nephew swore he didn’t eat).

The thread went viral (for the Pentaho world, anyway). People loved the croissant dashboard. They started sharing their own weird projects: a PDI job that tracked UFO sightings in Nevada, a CDA report that optimized a cat shelter’s adoption rates, a Saiku analytics cube that predicted beer sales at a German Oktoberfest. pentaho community

And somewhere in a dusty archive, the original thread still exists. Its final post, from Tomasz_P, is just a picture: a single, perfect, plain croissant next to a coffee cup and a laptop displaying a Pentaho job with all green checkmarks. It began with a baker named Elara in Lyon, France

One evening, a tech-savvy customer pointed her to a strange, green logo: Pentaho. Every Monday, she would spend six hours manually

Years later, when Pentaho moved further into enterprise and the forums quieted down, old-timers would still tell the story of the baker. They’d laugh about the JavaScript step. They’d debate the merits of the "Pentaho BA Server" vs. modern tools.

Instead, within 20 minutes, a reply came from "MattC_EE" in Seattle. It read: “Elara, you beautiful baker. You’re trying to feed a number into a text field. Right-click your ‘Sales Amount’ column in the ‘Select Values’ step and change the type to Number. Also, I love croissants. Here’s a screenshot of my fix.”

She applied the fixes. She ran the job.