We're happy to introduce you KafkaDB, our new baby which has just been published on bitbucket. KafkaDB is a tool that will greatly simplify database migrations between OpenERP versions but could also be extended to allow migration between versions of other PostgreSQL-based applications. At the project home page, you can find detailed information on its design and how to use it, but here I wanted to give some details on how we got there.

Just a quick note for those interested in trying a new set of accounting reports. We've published account_jasper_report module for OpenERP v6, which provides Journal, Trial Balance, General Ledger, and Invoice List reports. Until now, we've been using account_financial_report which had some modifications over standard and older reports, but unfortunately performance was very poor for companies with lots of account moves.

The new module is very fast and can create a General Ledger report with 58.000 move lines and 1.300 pages in just 1 minute and 30 seconds. (We had to wait several hours with older reports!).

Note that you will need latest version of jasper_reports module (download here).

At the recent Spanish meeting in Lugo (thanks Pexego!) we realized that several of the modules we did are being used in many cases. That makes us very happy, after all one of the advantages of Free Software is that many people can make use of a development and that helps to reduce costs and avoids reinventing the wheel. The only drawback is when things work well because we do not get feedback of who is using our developments and we like to hear they solved problems to other enterprises.

So we decided to start a new initiative in which anyone using any of the developments we started, be it a small OpenERP module, Koo or NanScan and also anyone that has created his own branch of any of them can tell us their story and we will publish it in our website  (with appropriate links or references). It doesn't matter if you just send us a couple of lines or you prefer to get into gory details. It's up to you! Our blog is yours!

If you're interested, send us your story to stories@nan-tic.com.

For those who don't know, Wt is an amazing C++ web development framework. There are thousands of frameworks out there but this is one of the very few that does actually take a different approach and makes web development really easy for those with no HTML or JavaScript knowledge while allowing them deliver buzz compatible applications. In fact, one can use Ajax, HTML5 canvas, HTML5 History API, Comet or embedded Google Maps without worrying about Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) or Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) with zero knowledge of the technologies or their security risks because all of them are wrapped around an intuitive API. The API is specially intuitive for those with Qt knowledge because the API is deliverately similar to Qt's.

We've talked several times about Full Text Search features of Koo. We have a small overview in our web page:

http://www.nan-tic.com/en/koo-platform-full-text-search

As well as several posts in our blog:

http://www.nan-tic.com/en/full-text-search

http://www.nan-tic.com/en/my-life-without-full-text-search

But I recently saw this article which compares Full Text Search performance in PostgreSQL with Oracle's. The comparison demonstrates, again, that PostgreSQL can compete with the big ones:

http://bit.ly/cnvQrW

PostgreSQL's performance and features allowed us to rapidly implement Koo's full text search feature, which offers users really fast results from the data stored in OpenERP. What about in your company, are you already more productive thanks to full text search?