Re: data/olap cubes

[Bob Morley <rm...@emforium.com>]

We are trying to fill our reporting needs by leveraging OLAP in Ofbiz.  Here
is our original approach:

- Expand upon the existing fact and dimension definitions
- Enhance the view-entity to support a "materialize" attribute -- this
attribute would cause a table to be created to represent the view-entity and
dynamically create EECAs on the underlying entities.
- Integrate Mondrian (OLAP4J?) - MDX along with performance and caching
- Integrate presentation tools - something similar to OpenI and/or
Jasper,JFreeChart,JPivot,etc

Not sure how well this would line-up with what the community would want to
do in general, but I suspect the first and perhaps second would be a good
fit.

We also talked about properly supporting hierarchical dimensions.

Thoughts?


Brett Palmer wrote:
> 
> Adam,
> 
> I am interested in your OLAP ideas.  I've haven't used the existing ofbiz
> olap tables directly, but I have used them to model new Star schemas.  I
> capture a lot of performance testing data and needed a way to query and
> report the results.
> 
> A lot of the work in data mining is breaking down the data to work
> appropriately in a start schema topology.  Creating a standard way to do
> this would be very helpful.  I like the idea of a dynamic view.
> 
> My approach to date has been the following:
> 
> - Define Fact Table and reuse DimensionTables as much as possible
> - Create common Java utils to handle dimension table look up from a flat
> file of imported data
> - Create Groovy scripts to tie the Java utils and file parsing together
> 
> I have also considered just using a common Fact Table entity with just
> generic column names and types to capture most common data imports.  Then
> use a meta table dimension table to define the columns used for the
> particular fact.
> 
> If anyone has thoughts on a generic approach to data mining I would
> appreciate the feedback.
> 
> Thanks Adam for bringing up the topic.
> 
> 
> Brett
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 10:14 AM, Adam Heath <do...@brainfood.com> wrote:
> 
>> Has anyone had any dealings with using data/olap cubes with ofbiz?
>> I've recently had some thoughts on how to maintain such data
>> structures automatically.
>>
>> This is somewhat of a brainstorm, but this is what I'm thinking.
>>
>> Define the cube with a dynamic view entity(possibly using my sql
>> representation).  Have this dve serialized to a DataCubeDescriptor
>> table.  Then, during ofbiz startup, it would read from
>> DataCubeDescriptor, auto-create any missing summary tables, then add
>> dynamic reverse ecas, so that any time the underlying data is
>> modified, the summary table would be auto-updated with new data.
>>
>> This would allow data cube querying to be instantaneous, because it
>> would just be dumping the summary table's contents.
>>
>> Does anyone else understand what I am describing?  Is anyone else
>> interested?
>>
> 
> 

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