I've been doing a ton of work with Microsoft's OLAP tech for these past few years (Analysis Services, OLAP cubes, Excel pivot tables, etc...), and I've spent a lot of time looking for an alternative...
In terms of tools that you can download and evaluate right away, the big one is Pentaho/Mondrian. I've spent a lot of time experimenting with it... I didn't like it. I wanted to love it, but it's not a usable replacement for Microsoft. It's very hard to use, it doesn't support a lot of the fancier cube features I use on Microsoft, and the GUI tools and cube browsing tools are terrible. I've also tried some Panorama/Google and it was terrible (lots of big early bugs) >From what I've heard, the best product on the market is Cognos (IBM), but they are very secretive about their products, and unless you are a customer or an employee, you can't evaluate their products at all. SAP is also very secretive about their products, but their products have a HUGE learning curve (completely unlike anything in the Java or .NET or C++ worlds). It's like 1970's era mainframe computing. I would avoid this as well. >From my investigation, there is really no alternative to Microsoft for standard large-volume OLAP cube technology that can be freely evaluated. The next thing I would like to investigate is non-cube very-large- database tech like Google BigTable. This provides very fast queries on very large data volumes and can be used to build similar large data reporting + analysis type applications without traditional OLAP cubes. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
