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Open, Web-Based OLAP Clients?

Posted by Cliff on from the needle-in-the-haystack? dept.

Zoloft asks: "I'm looking for a web-based OLAP client; something with lots of nifty features that PHBs find appealing. The normal available offerings are proprietary, expensive, and closed, closed, closed. Open-source would be nice but not required. Money is not an issue. What's important to me is: it's UNIX native - not NT native and ported with one of those bloated NT-to-UNIX layers - and its data formats are *open*, *readable* and *programmable* - whether it sits in files or a database. I have been beaten down for 10 months with this product that was forced upon me, which shall remain nameless of course. The only way to "develop" a custom app was through its piggish graphical front-end binary, obfuscated file formats and no programming or scripting hooks. I could go on and on, but you know the deal."

1 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Definitions, Definitions... by Christopher+B.+Brown · · Score: 5
    It's always useful to present some definitions when using a TLA or other acronym that everyone is not expected to be familiar with...

    OLAP usually stands for On Line Analytical Processing. (Footnote: the OLAP Council website claims to intend to provide common definitions, but do not actually provide a definition for OLAP...)

    Datamation describes it thus:

    On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a category of software technology that enables analysts, managers and executives to gain insight into data through fast, consistent, interactive access to a wide variety of possible views of information that has been transformed from raw data to reflect the real dimensionality of the enterprise as understood by the user.

    OLAP is pretty strongly associated with the common buzzword, "Data Warehousing."

    More precisely, what it is about is the notion of taking the data created by an online transaction processing system, and collecting this into a big database that you then want to do "analysis" on.

    The point here is that the analysts that are looking for patterns need to have a separate copy, as the things they do may hit a DB server hard, and are probably not friendly to the transaction-oriented operations of "Entering Invoices," "Processing Sales," "Paying Bills," and such.

    SAS is pretty big on OLAP, as they have been building powerful statistical software for many years now.

    --
    If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.