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THE COMMON THREAD IS THAT OLAP TOOLS DRAIN TOO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY BEFORE YOU GET WHAT YOU NEED.
"Business information from a business perspective" is the mantra for vendors in today's online analytical processing (OLAP) market. Their tools are meant to drill into databases to extract business information by reorganizing data relationships and offering users a variety of data views. The problem is, those tools continue to require a hefty investment of time and energy.
Our review of four OLAP tools shows that the task of making OLAP usable still bears a fairly high "elf quotient," the elves being the information systems professionals who are needed behind the scenes.
To get a sense of the OLAP marketplace, we looked at OLAP tools from four vendors: Andyne Computing Ltd.'s Pablo; Brio Technology, Inc.'s BrioQuery; Cognos Corp.'s PowerPlay; and IQ Software Corp.'s IQ/Vision. Business Objects, Inc. declined an invitation to submit its BusinessObjects product for review. The products were chosen as significant market players by industry analysts.
Each of the vendors also publishes a query and reporting tool, except for Brio, which markets its product as an integrated query/OLAP tool. We didn't examine those query and reporting tools in depth.
TEST ENVIRONMENT
We tested the tools on multiple Dell Computer Corp. OptiPlex GL5166 PCs running Windows NT Workstation 3.5I. The PCs were configured with 32M bytes of memory 2G-byte hard disks and a 3Com Corp. Io/100M bit/sec. Ethernet adapter in a switched Ethernet network. We also tested the query function of BrioQuery using an SQL 6.5 database containing the data set for a standard TPC-D style benchmark.
Two staff members worked with each product, viewing sample data sets, testing the ease with which data manipulation was accomplished, evaluating the range of graphics and composing analytical reports.
MULTIPLE USER AUDIENCES
There are essentially three categories of
OLAP tool users, ranging from the dedicated to the casual. At one end of the spectrum is the dedicated analyst, who does nothing but analyze data every day. That is usually a person with good technical skills and a strong grasp of database concepts. At the other end of the spectrum is the casual user who simply needs to see the results of an analysis and a few variations. That...