A New Kid on the OLAP Block

In what is undoubtedly a carefully orchestrated PR campaign, Microsoft has been teasing online analytical processing (OLAP) enthusiasts with details about its new OLAP server, code-named Plato, which will accompany SQL Server 7.0. Although Microsoft has yet to reveal how it will bundle Plato, what the price will be, or even the server's official name, OLAP enthusiasts, vendors, and industry analysts are already reacting to the upcoming release, which marks the company's entry into the OLAP market.

Because Microsoft’s entry into any market always changes the competitive landscape, existing OLAP vendors have been trying to grab market share while the grabbing is good. Consider these examples:

On January 26, Informix released a new version of its MetaCube ROLAP (relational online analytical processing) Option for the Informix Dynamic Server. MetaCube has important new features, including Web support (via Web Explorer) and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) support. "MetaCube has unique features that should make it particularly strong with really large data warehouses," said Nigel Pendse, lead author of The OLAP Report (http://www.olapreport.com). "The innovative aggregate optimizer, statistical sampling technology, and attractive Web options give it a real lead over ROLAPs in terms of both ease of deployment and performance." MetaCube is one of five options for the Informix Dynamic Server, which supports online transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehousing applications. (For information on MetaCube and other products and concepts mention in this article, see Table 1, which contains OLAP-Related Web sites and books.)

On February 6, IBM announced the availability of its first OLAP product, DB2 OLAP Server. The core DB2 OLAP Server is functionally equivalent to Arbor Software's Arbor Essbase, which supports dynamic calculation and OLAP partitioning and replication. DB2 OLAP Server ships with the Arbor Essbase Spreadsheet Client and Arbor Essbase Application Manager.

IBM sells personal, workgroup, and enterprise editions of the DB2 OLAP Server. IBM also offers a DB2 OLAP Server Tools Bundle (consisting of SQL Interface Tool, SQL Drill-Through, Currency Conversion, API, Extended Spreadsheet Tool), DB2 OLAP Web Gateway, DB2 OLAP Adjustment Module, and a DB2 OLAP Partitioning Option. IBM continues to offer its IBM Visual Warehouse (which now has an OLAP option) as a central management package that can automate the loading, updating, and recalculating of the star schema tables in the DB2 OLAP Server from a variety of data sources.

Despite IBM's and Informix's new products, Oracle's Oracle Express Server will be Microsoft's toughest competitor in the OLAP market. Oracle Express Server is a powerful but complex product that is only now beginning to be well integrated with other parts of Oracle’s product line, such as Oracle Applications and the Oracle7 and Oracle8 data servers. Oracle Express Server includes Oracle Express Web Agent, which you can implement as an Oracle WebServer cartridge or as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) so that it can work with other Web servers. Oracle Express Server customers can opt for special client packages, such as Oracle Financial Analyzer, Oracle Sales Analyzer, or Oracle Express Analyzer. (Although Oracle publishes an API for the Oracle Express Server, no Open Database Connectivity—ODBC drivers exist for it.) Oracle bundles Oracle Express Relational Access Manager (RAM) to provide mapping between Oracle Express Server and the traditional Oracle relational database management system (RDBMS) engine. RAM supports the star and snowflake schemas that are popular in data warehousing applications. Developers use Oracle Express Objects to create OLAP applications and can use ActiveX controls in their programs.

What Is OLAP?
Founded in 1995, the OLAP Council establishes guidelines for online analytical processing (OLAP) interoperability and data navigation (http://www.olapcouncil.org). The council defines OLAP as: "A category of software technology that enables analysts, managers, and executives to gain insight into data through fast, consistent, interactive access to a wide variety of possible views of information that has been transformed from raw data to reflect the real dimensionality of the enterprise as understood by the user."

In other words, you shouldn’t view OLAP simply as multidimensional databases, or data cubes, but rather as an environment that supports dynamic, multidimensional analysis of enterprise data. Most OLAP systems pre-aggregate data so that you can quickly and intuitively perform activities such as slicing and dicing, trend analyses, rollups and drill-downs, and rotations to new dimensions.

Laying the foundation
Before discussing the design of Microsoft’s OLAP server and the server's anticipated effect on the industry, let’s review what Microsoft has been doing to prepare for its entry into this new market. Here's a synopsis of the notable events.

In September 1996, eight vendors joined Microsoft as founding members of the Microsoft Alliance for Data Warehousing. The alliance began work on establishing repository and interoperability standards.

In July 1997, Microsoft announced a joint development and marketing agreement with PLATINUM technology, an alliance member. The companies plan to co-develop and co-market the next version of Microsoft Repository, a tool for storing and reusing objects, components, and source code. Platinum was granted exclusive rights to port the repository engine to MVS, AS/400, and most UNIX platforms. (Microsoft Repository 1.0 shipped with Visual Basic 5.0 in an unheralded release.)

In September 1997, the Microsoft Alliance for Data Warehousing released OLE DB for OLAP, a set of APIs to access and manipulate OLAP data. A few months later, Microsoft announced an open-design review process for gathering industry feedback on OLE DB for OLAP, which were to become the new data warehousing extensions for Microsoft Repository. This set of repository extensions enables vendors' data warehousing products to share information.

In January 1998, Microsoft demonstrated its innovative Data Transformation Services engine at the SQL Server 7.0 reviewer’s conference. The company also demonstrated several wizards that democratize the process of doing OLAP-type work.

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