Re: Drill-downs and OLAP type data

2011/10/12 Ondrej Ivanič <ondrej(dot)ivanic(at)gmail(dot)com>

> Hi,
>
> On 12 October 2011 14:50, Anthony Presley <anthony(at)resolution(dot)com> wrote:
> > After a few weeks of searching around, we're running into dead-ends on
> the
> > front-end, and the back-end. PG doesn't support OLAP / MDX .... and the
> GUI
> > tools that do this, for the most part, require MDX / OLAP (SPSS and DB2,
> MS
> > SQL Analytics, etc...).
> > What's the PG route here? Are there some secrets / tips / tricks /
> contrib
> > modules for handling this?
>
> Our db has very simple star schema and several materialised tables for
> aggregates. We need OLAP style queries with OLTP performance :). After
> several upgrades we ended up with 16 cores, 80GB of RAM and fast SAN
> but performance wasn't good. Meanwhile we evaluated several NoSQL
> solutions and several comercial MPP solutions -- and the winner is
> Greenplum! (you can get CE version for free -- max two processors (but
> unlimited cores) and almost no HA options). AsterData's nCluster has
> very nice MapReduce integration but looks quite immature.
>

The *problem* with Greenplum is that it's ultra-expensive once you leave the
CE version - and you're not supposed to be using the CE version for
commercial usage last I read the license. Has that changed?

The last pricing I saw was around $16k per CPU (it may have been per core?).
At that point, you're now in the realm of SQL Server Analysis and DB2 SPSS.

> I would say that roll-ups/drill-downs/cubes sound obsolete to me :) I
> suggest the following tools (list is not sorted by anything)
> - RapidMiner (http://rapid-i.com/content/view/181/196/)
> - Tableau (http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery)
> - AlpineMiner (http://www.alpinedatalabs.com/, http://alpineminer.org/)
> - Jasper (http://www.jaspersoft.com/)
> - Pentaho (http://www.pentaho.com/)
>

Thanks, but I'm well aware of all of these packages. Our problem is pairing
up a web based GUI to a database we love using. Doesn't seem possible,
because the user-friendly OLAP / data analysis / dashboard tools are all
expecting functionality that PG doesn't have.

It sounds like, we're either choosing a different DB to work with the pretty
GUI tools, or writing a GUI tool to work with PG.

--
Anthony Presley