Blogs

Simba sells various kinds of data access Software Development Kits (SDKs).  You might ask why; …

Very interesting news from Google this week as Google Docs now has pivot table functionality.  …

At the SAP Sapphire conference this week, I spent some time looking at the SAP …

I am at the annual SAP Sapphire conference this week and I attended a couple …

A lot of companies are developing solutions for the problem of big data.  However, these …

One of our large financial customers is using a novel and surprisingly-flexible OLAP dashboard technique …

I was reading an article in Information Management by Shaku Atre about “The Value of …

Simba is a data connectivity software company.  We are thus always dealing with data access …

How Do Excel and Business Intelligence Integrate in Your Organization? Simba invites you to participate …

I was reading a recent post on Information Management by Andreas Bitterer entitled “Consumerization and …

This year’s premier Oracle Users Group conference, Collaborate 11, just ended in Orlando, and I was lucky enough …

The Teradata acquisition of Aster Data has now closed.  Teradata is positioning Aster Data as …

Leo Apotheker presented his future strategy for HP and the recent acquisition of Vertica was …

Information Management has put out a list of 40 companies to watch which I thought …

I was reading a blog post from Bill Baker from May last year entitled “I.T. …

A large financial institution customer was recently relating how BI reporting was not the end …

Lot’s of interesting stuff from HP CEO Leo Apotheker today about cloud computing and big …

When describing the business of Simba Technologies (https://www.simba.com), for example to employment candidates, I occasionally …

Wow.  HP acquires Vertica and less than 3 weeks later, Teradata buys Aster Data!  2011 …

HP’s acquisition of analytical database management system (ADBMS) vendor Vertica made headlines when it was announced …

Here is the official press release about Kognitio’s Pablo product: http://www.kognitio.com/next-big-thing-in-data-analytics-no-more-physical-cubes. There is also a …

There are a number of ways to learn about OLAP concepts.  I’m not referring to …

Several times recently, such as after delivering a TDWI local chapter meeting talk, I explained …

There seems to be a lot of action in the data warehousing space. Last year, …

On news feeds and podcasts over the last few weeks, there have been lots of …

Contrary to folk wisdom, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, …

At Simba, because we are in the business of MDX Providers that are typically accessed …

Last week, I commented on the post about HP giving up on BI (https://www.simba.com/blog/is-hp-really-giving-up-on-bi-and-analytics/).  This …

It’s been interesting to watch the list of producers of live OData Services grow over …

So, last week SAP goes into ramp up with HANA 1.0 and now I read …

“Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both …

SAP just announced that their High performance ANalytical Appliance (HANA) is now available.  HANA supports …

Platform support for ODBC 3.8 has been available under Windows 7 (and Windows Server 2008 …

At Simba we often hear the term “spreadmart”.   This informal term, even defined on Wikipedia, …

“The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.”   You’d …

Matt Zenus and Carlos Bouloy presented on the Teradata Business Intelligence Optimizer (TBIO) last week …

In my last post, I mentioned “The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.” Usually this is meant by the speaker in a pejorative sense, indicating perhaps a perceived unwillingness of some vendors to work within existing standards, and instead wishing to define their own standard for any number of reasons, such as avoiding patent and IP issues, wishing to establish market leadership, locking out competitors, etc.

One good reason for introducing a new standard is efficiency. Most modern relational databases management systems are transactional databases. SQL is inherently transactional, making it ideal for OLTP databases. So, does that necessarily mean that if you have a database, you should access the data using SQL? Since you have a hammer, does everything look like a nail?

OLTP databases often need to be able to write lots of data, quickly. But businesses later need to deeply analyze all that transactional data. For that, a copy is extracted from the OLTP database, transformed into a more optimal format, and loaded into a data warehouse or an OLAP database. Yes, you can still use SQL to look inside a data warehouse, but it’s harder to use SQL to find patterns, quickly aggregate across the whole dataset, or do comparisons such as a time series. You can grab a coffee while you wait for it to finish.

In the mid-1990s, Microsoft introduced a new language for Multi-Dimensional eXpressions against an OLAP database, called MDX. It is a powerful but compact query language that knows and understand multi-dimensional databases/cubes. For example, if you want to know the sales of souvenir mittens at your retail outlet in Vancouver, BC during the month of February when the 2010 Olympics were held, you would write an MDX query that this:

SELECT
[Store].[Store Country].[Canada].[Vancouver] ON COLUMNS,
[Product].[All Products].[Clothing].[Mittens] ON ROWS
FROM [Sales]
WHERE ([Measures].[Unit Sales], [Date].[2010].[February])

However, if you wanted to write this in SQL, you’d need this cumbersome SQL query:

SELECT SUM(Sales.[Unit Sales])
FROM (Sales INNER JOIN Stores
ON Sales.StoreID = Stores.StoreID)
INNER JOIN Products
ON Sales.ProductID = Products.ProductID
WHERE Stores.StoreCity = ‘Vancouver’
AND Products.ProductName = ‘Mittens’
AND Sales.SaleDate BETWEEN ’01-02-2010′ AND ’28-02-2010′

It becomes even more verbose to write an SQL expression that compares Feb 2010 sales to that of the previous month, or the previous year. In contrast, MDX makes it easy to write very short succinct queries that are more direct to read and understand, which in turn reduces errors. And you can write more general expressions like “prior period” comparisons, that at every level of drill-down in time hierarchy (e.g. day, month, quarter, year) show or compare to the prior unit of time at that level.

I liken it to writing a program in assembler code versus in a high-level language programming language. You could do it, but why would you? This is not a perfect example, since assembler code is often faster than the high level language. However, in the SQL vs. MDX debate, it would be the MDX that is both easier to read and often faster since it expresses more clearly the goal of the query!

In recent years, many BI client vendors (SAP Business Objects, Microsoft, Cognos, and others) allow connections using MDX. This is a great move as it allows more powerful and general queries, an opportunity for better performance (especially against a cube), and greater interoperability. The latter is particularly valuable in the modern enterprise composed of acquisitions and mergers, thus leading to multi-vendor BI challenges that need to be bridged.

It’s not the sort of question that usually comes up over hors d’œuvres, but given …

I blogged about SAP’s High Performance Analytical Appliance (HANA) yesterday and someone followed up and …

It’s a good time to be making the switch from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows because …

Wayne Eckerson at TDWI wrote a nice overview and checklist about doing analytics on large …

According to CIO.com, “Pivot tables are perhaps one of the most popular methods for analyzing …

When I was in university, I had a professor who told the class, “The wonderful …

Since last year, Simba has partnered with Oracle to provide connectivity to the Oracle OLAP …

Oracle announced their fiscal Q1 and according to Larry Ellison, their Exadata pipeline has grown …

I am looking forward to OpenWorld next week because I am very curious what Larry …

Simba does a lot of work with Teradata, having recently partnered with Teradata on the …

One of the challenges in a world of large enterprises, especially those composed of acquisitions, …

Teradata recently launched their TBIO (Teradata Business Intelligence Optimizer) product.  Martin Willcox from Teradata has a little …

A few days ago, I commented on an article about Oracle’s shopping spree and someone …

Well, it is now official, Teradata has launched their Teradata OLAP Connector product which allows …

I note that Window’s transition from 32-bit to 64-bit has been an on-going saga for …

I was talking to a customer recently and they were telling me they have a very …

Interesting that Microsoft has announced that Windows 7 users can “downgrade” to Windows XP for …

Interesting news yesterday about EMC’s acquisition of data warehouse appliance company GreenPlum.  GreenPlum had of …

SAP’s pending acquisition of Sybase for 6 billion dollars has a lot of people talking.  …

Boris Evelson had an interesting blog entry about the “BI Implications Of SAP-Sybase Deal”.  You …

At the Oracle Collaborate conference last week, I attended a session presented by Ray Roccaforte …

We have had a number of customers try out our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP …

I was reading an interesting article by Stephen Swoyer at TDWI where he interviewed the …

Whoa!  At the Gartner BI Summit, they suggested we “Wave the white flag on using …

In the database warehouse/BI/analytics space, there is a lot of talk about in-memory technology and …

Now that the Winter Olympics in Vancouver are over, I can focus more on work.  …

There are a lot of people who currently use the Excel Spreadsheet Add-in for Oracle …

I was reading an interesting article by Larry Barrett about how Oracle’s series of acquisitions …

I just got the Oracle OLAP Newsletter for January 2010 and we got a nice …

Over the last year, we have been doing a fair bit of work with Oracle 11g …

Now that our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP 11g is released, the team has been …

Jenna Wortham wrote an interesting article that Apple’s AppStore is changing the game with mobile software.  …

I found a nice blog by Larry Dignan on Teradata’s Partners Conference which is worth …

Baseline magazine had an interesting article on Google entitled “How Google Works” http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Infrastructure/How-Google-Works-1/?kc=BLBLBEMNL11272009STR1.  This is …

Mike Vizard at CTOEdge wrote a nice piece about what Simba has done for Oracle …

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 was quite busy for me.  We jointly with Oracle launched our MDX …

I was reading Steve Ballmer’s latest email entitled “The New Efficiency” (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2009/09-29NewEfficiency.mspx) in which he basically …

According to a blog posting by Thomas Zurek at SAP (http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/13566%3Fpage%3Dlast%26x-maxdepth%3D0), accessing BW via OLAP …