Simulated OLAP

Question

We have a client that has Oracle Standard, and a project that would be ten times easier addressed using OLAP. However, Oracle only supports OLAP in the Enterpri

Answer 1

A few more thoughts on this topic:

Actually, Oracle Standard does have an OLAP facility based on a descendent of Express embedded in the database engine and storing its internal data structures in BLOBs in the main tablespaces. Using this is technically possible but not necessarily advisable for the following reasons:

It uses a highly non-standard OLAP query engine with very little third party tool support (AFAIK ArcPlan is the only third-party OLAP front-end supporting 10g+ OLAP), poor documentation for the query language and almost no third party literature describing it. This will work with B.I. Beans if you feel like writing a JSP front-end. It is not compatible with MDX at all. As of early 2006 the best Oracle could do when asked about drillthrough (this functionality was not supported in Discoverer 'Drake') was to recommend building a JSP apllication using B.I. Beans.

The reason that there is no migration path from Standard to Enterprise is that Enterprise is actually what used to be Siebel Analytics. Standard is the old Oracle OLAP/Express descendant which Oracle partners recommended avoiding even before Oracle bought out Seibel. Oracle has not even attempted to support migrating.

From this point of view, Mondrian is actually the most cost-effective OLAP solution for an Oracle Standard Edition shop. You can get a supported version from an outfit called Pentaho1. The next cheapest is Analysis Services, which comes with SQL Server. Following that you are into the likes of Hyperion Essbase, which will be an order of magnitude more expensive than SQL Server or any supported verion of Mondrian.