New OLAP concept

www.ContourComponents.com

ContourCube – new OLAP concept


Why OLAP?

In today’s fast-paced, information-driven economy, organizations heavily rely on real-time business information to make accurate decisions. The number of individuals within an enterprise who have a need to perform more sophisticated analysis is growing. With their ever-increasing requirements for data manipulating tools, end users cannot be already satisfied with flat grids and a fixed set of parameters for query execution.
OLAP is the best technology that empowers users with complete ease in manipulating their data. The very moment you replace your common grid with an OLAP interface users will be able independently to perform various ad-hoc queries, arbitrarily filter data, rotate a table, drill down, get desired summaries, and rank. From users’ standpoint, the information system equipped with an OLAP-tool gains a new quality, helps not only get information but also summarize and analyze it.
From the developer’s point of view, OLAP is an elegant way to avoid thankless and tedious programming of multiple on-line and printed reports.

A traditional transactional system will make it possible both to register business transactions and provide users with immediate answers to questions, such as, what goods have sold best this month, what seasonal fluctuations in sales are, how consumer preferences differ across various regions.

The programmatic ContourCube component enables flat grids to be replaced with powerful OLAP-grids and charts at desired parts of your systems and empowers any information system with Business Intelligence capabilities.

Why OLAP client?

There are two common ways to realize OLAP solutions. The first way is implemented through an OLAP Server with calculations being executed on a separate computer, the second way leverages an OLAP client to perform calculations on a user machine.
The OLAP Server requires additional investments and permanent maintenance and does not use the power of individual PCs. Nevertheless, it enables the huge volume of data to be managed.
The OLAP client is cheap and does not require any maintenance though it is capable of manipulating less volume of data.
Meanwhile, hardware capabilities are growing consistently and rapidly and today a common personal computer has tremendous capacity while processor providers do not seem intend to fall behind.

Concurrently, it’s worth to review accepted concepts and try to guess what may happen tomorrow. May it so turn out that OLAP calculations over general sets of business data become a trivial task? Won’t it happen today?
ContourCube can process hundreds of thousand of records on a typical modern PC, but aggregating records, while a SQL query is executed in the relational database server, means millions of records. This entirely meets most applications’ requirements.

ROLAP or MOLAP?

MOLAP stands for Multidimensional On-Line Analytical Processing and is used for creation of a multidimensional database out of relational or other flat data. Its structure specifically optimized for accomplishing OLAP operations provides users with maximum speed of data manipulating. The drawback of the approach is the need for the consistent database refreshing.
ROLAP is Relational On-Line Analytical Processing. The term ROLAP specifies that calculations are performed while a query across the relational database or relational Data Warehouse is executed. Among advantages provided by ROLAP are: real time operations, and no need to reload data to the extra database.
Which of these two technologies is better? As each of them has its upsides and downsides it is obvious that both are essential, but each in its own way. If your users may need to trace processes in a real time mode or data volumes for each specific query may not be large you should implement ROLAP. Whereas data volumes may turn out to be enormous and there is no need to support an online core data source, MOLAP is ideally suited.

ContourCube allows switching on the fly from one technology to another. You can connect the component to a relational database and empower users with ability to save data into the Contour microcube, a local multidimensional cube, to work in a offline mode, as well as providing other users with the microcube or publishing it.

Why ContourCube?

The five advantages that differ ContourCube from other OLAP tools and make it the best choice among the competing products are:
Simplicity and low price
The developer can embed OLAP functionality into her system just in a couple of days. Users can adopt its intuitive interface in half an hour. Regardless of the number of users its price remains constant.
High performance
In internal OLAP benchmark results, data volumes processed by ContourCube are ten times as much as those processed by other OLAP components. Moreover, up to certain volumes, ContourCube operates even more quickly than the OLAP server does. There are no architectural constraints in ContourCube, more RAM and higher CPU clock rate increase its capabilities.
Rich analytical capability
ContourCube encompasses not only standard algorithms, such as the Sum and Average functions, but also more than a dozen of statistics functions, such as Dispersion, Average Deviation, to name but a few. Multidimensional sorting, true multidimensional ranking, and the Last algorithm expand the usage of the OLAP tool and make data presentation much more clear and useful.
New concept of mobile microcube
The MOLAP technology provided by ContourCube significantly differs from traditional conceptions.
By replacing preliminary aggregation with special indexing and compressing data into the saved file, the ContourCube microcube saves data as compactly as possible, thus enabling calculations on the fly and reducing the microcube’s volume. As a result, large databases can be published on the Web, delivered by email.
Besides, ContourCube microcube saves not only data but also metadata that defines both the structure of a multidimensional database, calculation algorithms and all the details of the end-user’s interface. Therefore, the microcube can be considered a full-fledged analytical application that can be presented and modified by various programs equipped with ContourCube. This is similar to an Excel book containing both data and its interface definition or how a jpeg-file can be viewed through different applications.
Because ContourCube can read the microcube’s data via the http protocol, microcubes can be used for publishing any financial and statistical data via Internet.

ContourCube home site: http://www.ContourComponents.com
ContourCube (c) 2002 Intersoft Lab