Open Source OLAP : Standards DO WORK!

A while back I had an impromptu collaboration with Chris Harrington to see if any of his XML/A clients could interoperate with Mondrian. Our initial results were encouraging and Chris has taken some time to put Mondrian to task on his XML/A compatibility tests.

His results, well, I’ll let them speak for themselve:

I have a cmd file full of xmla.wsf invocations to test many kinds of Discover calls and a few Execute calls. So I had this as a ready-made compatability test. I just changed the XML/A URL and the catalog name (“FoodMart” instead of “FoodMart 2000”) and ran the script.
All of my XML/A invocations except one worked against Mondrian.

Apparently MSAS is slight more forgiving on some syntax issues (brackets, curly braces and such) but overall Mondrian can actually BE an XMLA provider to clients.

Very encouraging… Considering the economics of inexpensive Lintel servers, bitmap indices and partitioning, and the aggregate table feature in Mondrian: building a reasonable (ActiveInterface.com. Chris provides BI consulting services but also has a couple of cool XMLA clients.

PS – All of this because of investing in the XMLA standard.

One thought on “Open Source OLAP : Standards DO WORK!

  1. ALexander

    Hallo Nicholas,

    first I want to say that your blog was very very useful to me so far.
    But could you explain exactly to me how you and Chris did that XML/A invocations and how to configure mondrian right so it functions as a XML/a Provider.(I already read at pentaho, but it didn’t work out)

    mfg
    Alexander

    Reply

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