Friday, April 4, 2008
OLAP and AS3
Friday, April 4, 2008 
There seems like there is no end to the new stuff one can learn about ActionScript 3.0. I was checking around the Advanced DataGrid in Flex, and wanted to glean some more usage insight online. And one of the links I ended up following was Sreenivas Ramaswamy's (Adobe Bangalore) blog. He mentions a whole bunch about OLAP. Well, I've never heard of OLAP before.
Update:
Through that GTalk mechanism I have on my blog, Daniel from onrails.org contacted me. He has a lot of experience using OLAP and Activewarehouse. It seems on the surface that I simply may never need to consume as much data as OLAP makes it easier to get lots of data in a condensed way.
He mentioned that the Flex implementation is still a bit slow, and mentioned throwing all the data at a OLAP cube wouldn't be the optimal way to do things.
Well, I remember that Live Cycle Data Services page data... and I imagine that this would tie right into the Advanced DataGrid?
So you could combine OLAP and the paging of LC for snappy interogation and display? You could have a set of data a million rows deep and your grid would only be as slow as the connection buffer to the server to the data. If I am off-base here, forgive me. I am still reading up on this and going through what Daniel IM'd me... and its all a little abstract until I actually play with some code and data and see for myself the interactions.
Wikipedia: Online Analytical Processing, or OLAP (IPA: /ˈoʊlæp/), is an approach to quickly provide answers to analytical queries that are multi-dimensional in nature. OLAP is part of the broader category business intelligence, which also encompasses relational reporting and data mining. The typical applications of OLAP are in business reporting for sales, marketing, management reporting, business process management (BPM), budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting and similar areas. The term OLAP was created as a slight modification of the traditional database term OLTP (Online Transaction Processing).
Okay, but still... wtf. Multi-dimensional arrays. I am not sure if I will ever really need to use OLAP in my own work (I do use multi-dimensional arrays all the time though)... but I figure I should probably at least become familiar enough with it so I can make better educated design decisions should the need arise that might benefit from using the power of OLAP and AS3/Flex.Update:
Through that GTalk mechanism I have on my blog, Daniel from onrails.org contacted me. He has a lot of experience using OLAP and Activewarehouse. It seems on the surface that I simply may never need to consume as much data as OLAP makes it easier to get lots of data in a condensed way.
He mentioned that the Flex implementation is still a bit slow, and mentioned throwing all the data at a OLAP cube wouldn't be the optimal way to do things.
Well, I remember that Live Cycle Data Services page data... and I imagine that this would tie right into the Advanced DataGrid?
So you could combine OLAP and the paging of LC for snappy interogation and display? You could have a set of data a million rows deep and your grid would only be as slow as the connection buffer to the server to the data. If I am off-base here, forgive me. I am still reading up on this and going through what Daniel IM'd me... and its all a little abstract until I actually play with some code and data and see for myself the interactions.
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