I'm looking for a Delphi VCL crosstab/cube/pivotcube/olap grid component for Delphi 2009, 2010, or XE. I'm willing to sacrifice advanced features to get something open/free (or very cheap if I must) to make it easier to collaborate with any future developers without anyone having to purchase more components than I already use, since this will just be used in one screen. If there isn't anything appropriate out there, I may try to implement something simple on my own. I can live with some fairly basic features: drag and drop to configure dimensions, sort by a column, allow totals/min/max for a column, and (optionally) expand/collapse or drill down to sub-categories. Blazing performance and enterprise scalability are not required, since there should be less than 2000 source rows.
There appear to be several decent options in the commercial space (ExpressPivotCube, FastCube, HierCube), but they are all a few hundred dollars. This project already uses existing installations of Excel 2007 and SQL Server 2005/2008, so I might consider leveraging those, though I'd prefer a native Delphi component, if possible. There are also the very old Decision Cube components included in Delphi's Source\xtab directory, but they apparently no longer support unicode compilers (Delphi 2009+), since I got dozens of unicode-related compilation errors while test compiling that source in Delphi XE. Those components also still link to the long-deprecated BDE! Has anyone modified Decision Cube to support unicode/pure-TDataSet? The online tutorials I found were incomplete and silent on the dozens of BDE/unicode compilation errors I see, so I might have to tackle that on my own.
Does anyone have suggestions where to start for a free/cheap basic crosstab/pivot grid component?