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Archive for the ‘olap’ Category

I’ll give up Excel Pivot Tables when you take ‘em from my cold, dead hands

Posted in BI, Palo, excel, olap, tagged , , , , on October 10, 2008 | 11 Comments »

Jedox, the company behind the open source MOLAP server Palo, has just announced an MDX/XMLA driver. This means that it’s now possible to access Palo cubes using Excel Pivot Tables or indeed any tool that supports ODBO or XMLA.  This is excellent news, as MOLAP to most Excel users IS a Pivot Table, and somewhat like [...]

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Why Larry hates the cloud, and my data trinity.

Posted in AmazonAWS, ETL, Palo, SQLite, cloud, excel, olap, tagged , on October 4, 2008 | No Comments »

Last week Oracle certified Amazon EC2 as a supported platform, that same week Larry Elison attacked the concept of cloud computing as pure hype. Obviously, Larry is not happy with this whole cloud thing, and I think it’s not just the threat it poses to the software industry’s traditional licensing model that worries him, rather, as Robert X. Cringely [...]

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Cloudy skies, cloudy apps…

Posted in BI, ETL, Ireland, Palo, Web2.0, cloud, data, excel, news, olap, tagged , , , on August 28, 2008 | 4 Comments »

Just back from a break in Clifden, Connemara, summer is nearly over, the kids return to school today, back to work.
Counties Galway and Mayo were like the rest of the country last week, a tad wet, but unlike the developed east of the island, flooding was not a problem; a problematic drainage area is called [...]

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Talend + SQLite + Groovy the new Oracle …

Posted in BI, EC2, ETL, Groovy, Palo, SQLite, Talend, data, excel, olap, tagged , on August 2, 2008 | 5 Comments »

… well, at least for me.  Let me explain.
For most of my datasmithing career, I’ve had access to corporate Oracle databases and now with the availability of  Oracle10g  Express I can even run my own Oracle instances at home or on EC2.  The combination of a powerful SQL engine, expressive scripting language (PL/SQL) ,OS independence, [...]

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OLAP Cube as a Mind Map

Posted in BI, Palo, excel, olap, tagged , , on July 30, 2008 | No Comments »

If you’ve worked with OLAP technologies for any length of time you’ll undoubtedly have been in the situation where you’ve had to explain the concept of an OLAP Cube to a “newbie”.  If the person in question has come across Excel pivot-tables, then you can probably short-circuit the conversation some what, explaining that a pivot [...]

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Postgres Plus Cloud Edition is boring …

Posted in AmazonAWS, BI, EC2, ETL, S3, SQLite, SimpleDB, olap, tagged , , , on March 27, 2008 | 2 Comments »

… and that’s good. That’s how I like my databases, boring, reliable, consistent, easy to use.
SimpleDB on the other hand is not boring, it’s an exciting new shiny thing that opens up a myriad of new possibilities; but first, I and the rest of the developer community, need to tool up and cast aside [...]

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Dublin Bus and PALO ETL - the connection!

Posted in AmazonAWS, BI, ETL, Palo, S3, SQLite, SimpleDB, Talend, VBA, excel, kettle, olap, tagged , , , , on January 26, 2008 | 5 Comments »

Dublin buses, as is the norm with most road-based public transport systems in our increasingly car-choked cities, tend to operate on the basis of “no sign of a bus for ages, then two or three arrive at the same time”. Palo MOLAP ETL options appear to be following the same pattern; we’ve been waiting for [...]

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PALO ETL-Server and SAP

Posted in ETL, Palo, olap, tagged , , on January 5, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Jedox have just published a roadmap for their open-source ETL-Server, release date of March 2008, same date as the next release of the Palo OLAP Server. In a future release they intend to offer SAP RFC/BAPI and SAP-BW XMLA support, being an old SAP hand this looks very interesting.
There’s also a features page [...]

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PALO ETL Server, more sightings …

Posted in ETL, Java, Palo, olap, tagged , , , , on January 3, 2008 | 1 Comment »

First day back after Christmas, snow falling outside.
More additions to the PALO ETL-Server SourceForge project, new version of the core and, a new web server - built using Jetty and Apache Axis. Axis is a SOAP handler so I looked around for the WSDL file to see what services are to be exposed and [...]

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New ETL platform for PALO OLAP

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, Talend, kettle, olap, tagged , , , on November 28, 2007 | No Comments »

Jedox have announced that they intend to ship a Palo centric ETL open source server product early next year. This is excellent news and is on top of the new rules engine that was added to Palo this summer. Open source MOLAP has suddenly taken off the training wheels and is getting ready [...]

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In Memory OLAP

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, SQLite, VBA, data, excel, olap, xLite on September 5, 2007 | 4 Comments »

The consolidation within the BI market continues, this time with the purchase of Applix by Cognos. As Timo Elliott points out, the interesting bit is the Applix TM1 memory-centric OLAP product. For the vast majority of OLAP users (i.e. the millions of Excel Pivot table jockeys) in-memory OLAP is nothing new, but traditionally [...]

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SQLite Star Query Part II

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, SQLite, VBA, excel, olap, xLite on August 31, 2007 | No Comments »

In my previous post I looked at simulating a bitmap-join in SQLite using a sub-query and the INTERSECT command. The problem is of course, this is a simulation, SQLite lacks bitmap indices and although the sub-query will read only the fact table’s index B-trees (avoiding accessing the fact table proper) and should be [...]

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SQLite Star Query

Posted in BI, ETL, SQLite, olap on August 30, 2007 | 1 Comment »

While investigating the nature of SQLite’s query optimisation strategy I came across this 2004 presentation by D. Richard Hipp which provides a excellent overview of SQLite’s technical architecture. The reason I’m looking at the optimiser is to figure out if SQLite can handle a star-schema query.
First impressions were not promising as [...]

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Palo 2.0 (beta) released.

Posted in BI, Palo, excel, olap on August 4, 2007 | 1 Comment »

The latest 2.0 version (beta) of Palo has just be released. You can download it here……
The major enhancement over V1.5 is the addition of server-side rules. The rule syntax is similar to that found in TM1 or Essbase e.g. ['Profit%Sales'] = ['Profit']/['Cost of Sales']*100 but Palo rules are restricted to ’stand alone’ [...]

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Talend and Perl

Posted in ETL, Palo, Talend, olap, tagged on August 3, 2007 | 2 Comments »

I’ve downloaded V2.1 of the open source Talend ETL tool; lots of new connectors added and the Java SQLite connector no longer requires a JNI adapter. I’ve evaluated Talend in the past mainly concentrating on its Java code generating capability, this time I revisited the original Perl generator. Why? Well I know Perl, [...]

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I’ve got talend and I’m going to use it…

Posted in BI, ETL, Java, Palo, SQLite, Talend, data, excel, kettle, olap, xLite on April 30, 2007 | 1 Comment »

For the last few months I’ve being looking for my ideal ETL platform. That ideal would be open source, platform independent (well at least Windows and Linux), flexible, and easily deployable. It had looked like a combination of Kettle and my micro-ETL combinations of Ruby/SSQLite and Excel/SQLite would be the eventual “winners”. [...]

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Talend ETL - A New Contender

Posted in BI, ETL, SQLite, Talend, kettle, news, olap on April 26, 2007 | 4 Comments »

Talend have released a new version of their Open Studio ETL tool. Not as full featured as Pentaho Kettle; only supports a limited number of databases and file formats - no SQLite support shock-horror! The press release promises More than 100 Native Connectors and promises connectors to ERP and CRM tools but [...]

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New Open Source OLAP

Posted in BI, ETL, data, news, olap, tagged on April 22, 2007 | 4 Comments »

Cubulus is a Mondrian-like OLAP engine supporting a subset of MDX and offering an alternative way of organising fact tables using “hierarchial range clustering of keys” rather than the traditional star-schema approach. Written in Python, very much a pre-alpha release. Interesting but a bit too experimental for me this early on a Sunday morning; [...]

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