Reporting tool for OLAP, *not* OLTP!
- by Stefan Moser
I'm looking for a control that I can put on top of an already existing OLAP star schema to allow the user to define their own "queries" and generate reports. Right now I have some predefined reports built on top of the cubes, but I'd like to allow the user to define their own criteria based on the cubes that I've created. I've found lots of products that will allow you to treat a transactional table like an OLAP cube, but nothing specifically for pre-existing cubes.
EDIT: Let me be clear, I know there are countless reporting tools out there that claim to report on OLAP cubes. The problem is they all assume they are looking at transactional data and try to create their own cubes. I have tables that contain tens, if not hundreds of millions of records. Most tools crash when handling this much data, the others just run incredible slowly. I don't want a tool that is targeting the business people.
I want a tool that understands what a star and snowflake schema is. I want to be able to tell it what the fact tables are and what the dimension tables are, and then creates a UI on top of them. This is an easier problem to solve for the tool vendor because I am spoon feeding them the cubes. I want to rely on the fact that cubes are a standardized pattern and I want a tool that takes advantage of this fact. I want a tool that targets developers and starts with the assumption that I actually know how to manage my data, it just needs to build pretty reports for me and not crumble under the weight of my data.