Can OLAP be done in BigTable?

Question

In the past I used to build WebAnalytics using OLAP cubes running on MySQL. Now an OLAP cube the way I used it is simply a large table (ok, it was stored a bit smarter than that

Answer 1

If you are looking for a table-scan approach, have you considered Google BigQuery? BigQuery does automatic scale-out on the back-side that gives interactive response. There is a good session by Jordan Tigani from the 2012 Google I/O event that explains some of the internals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI8623HlYd4

It's not MapReduce but it is geared towards high-speed table scan like what you described.