I have recently downloaded the latest package of training material, as I am approaching an in-person training next week.
I found out, that now even the most basic course utilizes pretty new nodes, like the Expressions node.
I personally find this not a very clever move by KNIME, tbh. Because what KNIME AG as a software vendor should understand that software packaging within big companies is a pretty cumbersome process.
In our company for example we still run 5.2.3. because it takes weeks to months to align with all necessary departments (Cybersecurity, Data Protection, IT etc etc) to provide a newer version.
Yes, we definitely want to upgrade to 5.4.x but basically right now, the example / exercise workflows are unusable, because Expressions extension is not available or not installable for 5.2.3
I understand that certain topics are very interesting (I don’t want to use the buzzword AI here), but this type of features should NOT be the core of KNIME.
My feedback as an experienced trainer here really is, create exercises that do not rely on these “buzzwordy” nodes but - at least for the L1 course - use more basic nodes.
I now know to search all of my downloads from the past 2 years to find some old exercises, that match my version which is a pretty annoying task, tbh.
Do you have all the workflows/slides you need for the training? Otherwise, I’ll be happy to share prior versions of the materials. We keep them in an internal archive for such requests but don’t expose all of them through our teaching materials repository. Happy to help!
I know that this is sometimes a bit difficult because some enterprises are more conservative in what features they allow and how and others are not. Which is the root cause for this whole discussion
I found the relevant content though on my computer (at least the stuff I wanted to show). Plus some additional examples that match the official curriculum but are “my own” (so to say) so it worked out fine.
I want to second your statement about “software packaging and deployment in big companies is a pretty cumbersome process.” We at best can do one version upgrade per year. The other part of that is at many companies, individuals cannot download any software directly from the internet for security reasons. This makes it nearly impossible to implement things like Python in the newer versions of KNIME because it tries to download packages directly from the internet as part of the extension installation.
Thanks for raising the point about complicated installations of Python-based extensions @StevenLauretti. A lot of users behind corporate proxy setups struggled with installing Python-based extensions because of this download-at-install-time. Thus, we have changed our packaging strategy to include all Python packages since KNIME AP 5.4. From 5.4 on you can e.g. install Python-based extensions from the zipped update site without needing an internet connection.
The same is true for the bundled Python environment that we ship with the KNIME Python Integration, but there we always shipped all packages.
So unless you need to set up custom Python environments, you should be able to use Python Script nodes as well as Python-based extensions in your corporate setup.
Hi Carsten,
Thank you for the update. We are looking the AP 5.4 as the next one to install. This will make a huge difference for people. We were keeping the 4.7.2 version around for the people that had set up Python.
We have done custom environments, but we have those built outside of KNIME and then just reference them inside of KNIME.
We have never been able to get KNIME to point to our internal package repository. If we could get that working, then KNIME would be able to create a custom package using the packages that are already in our repository.
