Re: Requesting Advice on OLAP Reporting Tools

On Mar 31, 10:22 pm, ad...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mar 29, 1:30 pm, TC <golemdan...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:





I'm not very familiar with the world of OLAP. Nevertheless, I suspect
that some of my current projects might benefit from the right OLAP
product. I'd like to describe my needs and see if anyone can suggest a
product for me.

First of all, I need a simple OLAP reporting tool -- something which
links to a data source, offers an easy user interface for defining
reports, and generates tables that can be copied or saved. Something
like Excel's pivot table feature, only better.

Note that I am not looking for a "Business Intelligence" Suite. From
what I've seen, most OLAP products are all about dashboards charts and
metrics and fancy stuff like that. Hyperion and Cognos and Analysis
Services may have basic reporting tools, but if they do, they are
buried deep within enterprise software which I can't afford and don't
want. I just want an app that focuses on slicing and dicing a cube,
and that's all.

Second, I need an Excel add-in that lets me pull aggregate data out of
my cube and put it into a spread***. Specifically, I need to sum,
count, and average over any subset of the cube. I also need to find
values corresponding to given percentiles (e.g. find a median). Again,
I don't want some huge software package. I just need a simple, thin,
add-in that I can train someone to use.

Any suggestions?

-TC

Hi TC

I work for a professional service firm and our core product is an OLAP
solution called proCube.  It is fast, scalable and and easy to use.
The syntax with in the cubes is the same as MS Excel and we use MS
Excel as our report writer.

Out strengths are in budgeting and forecasting, management reporting,
payroll reporting and to lesser degree, dash boarding.  If you would
like more info, please drop me a line, deveringham at
satorigroup.com.au.  phone (Australia) + 61 431 475 606

seewww.satorigroup.com.au

The Satori Group is an international consulting company specialising
in designing and implementing business improvement solutions- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Thanks for the replies.

I found a program called NumberGo (http://www.numbergo.com), which
comes very close to satisfying the first of my two requirements.
NumberGo has a simple, drag-and-drop interface which is easy enough
for my end-users. Unfortunately, it has a few problems: 1) The applied
filters aren't shown on the screen, so the user can't understand the
report definition at a glance, and must do some clicking to figure out
what he's seeing; 2) the GUI uses boxes to show the row, column, and
data elements, but it doesn't always size those boxes well, so
sometimes you just can't read them at all; 3) when it reads the
columns from the cube, it doesn't distinguish between columns which
represent dimensions and columns which represent data. The burden of
sorting that out is on the (less-skilled) end-user, not the (more
skilled) cube designer. Nevertheless, NumberGo is the best thing I've
found so far -- and it is free -- so I'll go with it until something
better turns up.

Roman, for this application, I'm mainly using SQL Server, but I'd like
an application that works with any data source. I'm working for a
large organization that probably uses some OLAP engine somewhere, but
I have no license for it. For practical purposes, I'm starting from
scratch.

Everingham, I wasn't able to follow the link you provided for ProCube.


-TC
.