[Mondrian] preferred communication mechanism?

[Julian Hyde]

You're using the right mechanism.

The other mechanism, of course, is to buy a Pentaho subscription. Then you
have access to someone whose primary goal is to make you happy by answering
your questions. (My goal is to make you happy, but in different ways.)

Subscription costs money, but not a lot. If you value your time at, say,
$100 per hour, then a subscription pays for itself very fast; if system
downtime costs $5000 per hour, then it pays for itself very fast indeed.

For the record, these are my communications preferences. I prefer the
mailing list mondrian at pentaho.org for developers, discussions about possible
bugs/features, and for advanced users. The forums are better for general
help and for newbie questions.

I see emails on the mailing list within an hour or two, and respond
immediately or within a couple of days depending on the importance of the
issue. I check the forums at best once a day, at worst every 3 or 4 days.

The volume on the developer list is pretty good right now because people are
using it sensibly. If the community at large sees my above comments and
starts to use the developer list for other issues, then we will have to do
something about the developer list.

I do not use IRC at all. Sorry to those who like it as a communications
medium, but my bandwidth is maxed out so I can't take on a low latency
channel.

Your questions are of a general help nature - although some are not out of
place on the developers list.

I confess that I skip a lot of questions in the forum and the mailing list
that I know the answer to, or could find the answer to. It pains me to do
that, but I have to prioritize, and that means focusing on things that only
I can do. To give you an idea of my priorities, here are some examples of
posts I have made in the last week:

* http://forums.pentaho.org/showthread.php?p=195198
* http://forums.pentaho.org/showthread.php?t=64775
* http://forums.pentaho.org/showthread.php?t=64643
* http://julianhyde.blogspot.com/2008/09/is-oracle-about-to-embrace-mpp.html

I'm sorry you are having problems getting aggregations to work. I'm afraid I
tend to avoid questions about aggregations, just like installation
questions. They take a lot of cycles to fix and rarely generate any insight
that would help us make the product better. I wish that were not so.

Julian