December 18th 2010 07:15 pm
5 years of open source Kettle
Dear Kettle fans,
Five years ago, in early December 2005, I released Kettle in the form of 160,000 lines of Java code. The only thing that this initial open source version of Kettle had going for it was the fact that it worked. Sure it wasn’t perfect as no data integration tool can ever be perfect. However, a few messages left and right and the fact that it worked quickly lifted it from a one-mans pet project to the globally cooperating Pentaho Data Integration project that it is today.
Most if not all of the 160,000 lines of code have been altered or re-written in the mean time by a team of around 70 committers, hundreds of direct contributors, thousands of volunteers and hundreds of thousands of users. The codebase has grown to 675,000 lines of code in the core project and we have created a whole ecosystem around Kettle now too. Not only are there the dozens of plugins, Agile BI, the Kettle-cookbook project, the Kettle Franchise Factory (KFF), we also have projects that embed or fork Kettle like GeoKettle and Quipu. In those 5 years we also managed to translate Kettle into many global languages and have 3 books out on the subject with a 4rd and maybe a 5th on its way in China. Clearly the marriage of Kettle and Pentaho did both a lot of good. In the (almost) five years I’ve been with them, Pentaho has grown from a small shop to a global corporation with a staggering growth and enormous potential.
I’m not sure it’s necessary to drawn any conclusions out of this. Just allow me to make the observation that we’re still alive and kicking unlike a lot of top-brand-Gartner-MQ ETL-tools out there. For me it was mostly an interesting and humbling experience that invites me to keep going for new innovative ideas in the coming year. The road map for next years looks very promising indeed.
For now however, I’m simply going to drink an extra glass to all of you out there with an interest in Kettle and especially to all of you who helped us along the way. Perhaps in the new year at the Pentaho Global Partner Summit in San Francisco (Jan 19-20th) you can join me in celebrating 5 years of Kettle.
Cheers!
Matt
12 Comments »
Josep on 18 Dec 2010 at 19:58 #
Congratulations for this five years! I’m sure that the best is yet to come.
Crorella on 18 Dec 2010 at 22:44 #
Happy Birthday, Kettle!
Juan Jose on 19 Dec 2010 at 2:30 #
Hi Matt,
Congratulations with 5 years of Kettle. Quipu does not (yet) embed Kettle, but can generate Kettle transformations. By the way the link to the Quipu site is: http://www.datawarehousemanagement.org I’m also thinking of creating a Quipu perspective for Kettle, but that’s a long term plan.
Regards,
JJ.
Sylvain on 19 Dec 2010 at 12:47 #
Joyeux Anniversaire Kettle !
Un grand salut amical à ton “papa” Matt
Un fan de Kettle depuis 2006 !
Roland Bouman on 19 Dec 2010 at 17:42 #
Hi Matt!
congrats to you and Pentaho with 5 years of leading, innovative open source ETL!
Kettle is part of my daily toolkit, and my life as a professional would be incredible hard without it.
(btw - thanks for mentioning kettle-cookbook and the “Pentaho Kettle Solutions” book
Herwin Rayen on 20 Dec 2010 at 7:58 #
Happy Birthday Kettle
..
Congrats Matt!!!
Mark Dathorne on 20 Dec 2010 at 15:41 #
Huge congrats to the Kettle team. You’ll always be Kettle to me … PDI, pah!
Paul Van Brabant on 23 Dec 2010 at 13:34 #
Well Matt,
Congratulations too … for this extreme realisation …
You had a great idea (born out of your Oracle frustration)
and you did realise it too. (Entrepeneur of the year?)
And by the way … we do not have to go to SF to drink a glass on your aniversary?
Happy Christmas too and best for 2011.
Paul VB
Buck Golemon on 08 Feb 2011 at 21:28 #
Congrats Matt.
Keep up the good work. Your support is the best!
I hope to see Kettle improve just as much in the next five years
Jason on 23 Feb 2011 at 9:14 #
Happy birthday kettle!
A congratulation from china….
Kettle is now a part in my daily life.
we use kettle in so many projects from kettle 2.3 to current 4.1.
Now we( http://www.pentahochinal.com originally http://www.xgndata.com ) are translating <> into chinese (6 chapters are finished).
even though there is a long way to publish, we ‘ll stick it out.
Reginald Jackson on 09 Mar 2012 at 19:15 #
Congratulations are certainly in order-especially with 3 books you have written in 5 years on open source kettle.
Matt Casters on 12 Mar 2012 at 14:42 #
Thanks but I only wrote one book Reginald: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470635177.html