Developing a General Purpose OLAP Client Prototype Using XML for Analysis

Today's information systems mostly rely on relational databases for transactional data storage and manipulation. Throughout the years, massive amounts of data have been gathered. Those data, if properly analyzed, could serve as a basis for strategic decisions. For the purposes of analysis data is transformed from relational model (database) into dimensional model and stored in a data warehouse. Informations gained from gathered data provide an advantage that, in the conditions of sharp business competition, could be distinguishing. Followed by intense hardware development, that was the main reason for rapid data warehousing development and acceptance in the past years. However, data warehousing platform includes more than relational database holding data in a dimensional model: exhaustive data warehousing platform comprises of data warehouse server, OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) server and some data mining functionality. OLAP stands for a type of application that attempts to facilitate multidimensional (i.e., data that has been aggregated into various categories or "dimensions") analysis. OLAP should help a user synthesize enterprise information through comparative, personalized viewing as well as through analysis of historical and projected data. The main characteristic of OLAP systems is providing multi-dimensional view of the data and answers to queries at high response rates. Unlike relational databases that show some degree of uniformity through the SQL and ODBC standards, there are no generally accepted standards for communicating with OLAP databases. Such situation makes development of OLAP client tools more complicated and expensive. This results in platform specific and more expensive products that are, therefore, less acceptable to the end users. In this article two major initiatives for OLAP standardizations are discussed. Also, an OLAP client tool based on the XML for Analysis (XMLA) protocol with a sufficient set of functionalities was developed.