Re: OLAP - Mailing list pgsql-general

Hi Alban,

I think Postgres works great for OLAP work, and Amazon's Red Shift is
even based on Postgres. 100 million sales should be not problem at
all. My understanding is Greenplum also builds on top of Postgres, so
if you ever do outgrow your Postgres installation, that would be an
easy migration path. One Postgres OLAP tool to consider is Pentaho.
That will save you lots of time around ETL, ad-hoc reporting, and
other standard OLAP functionality.

Good luck!
Paul



On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 8:12 AM, Alban Hertroys <haramrae@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> At work we have a system that's built on top of a proprietary OLAP database
> system (Rocket Gentia). We're looking into replacing that system with
> something that's still supported and in such a way that we can also access
> the data from our reporting software (WebFOCUS by information builders).
>
> Because I'm always advocating PG, I was asked whether PG would be suitable
> for this, but I'm not really familiar enough with OLAP databases to be able
> to comment on that.
>
> I got three prerequisites for a solution, namely:
> 1. It must contain correct information,
> 2. It must be fast and
> 3. It must be easy to maintain the data and the models; that's a task for a
> 3rd party back-end application, but it would be helpful to be able to name
> something to the higher-ups.
>
> Next to that, because we're also going to access the system using our
> reporting software (which is read-only access), it would be best if the
> entire data model and all the business rules are stored inside the database
> so that we're looking at the data in the same way that the "back-end" sees
> it.
>
> For size, we're looking at about 20 years of sales and shipment data all
> over the world (although mostly in Europe) for about 5mln sold products per
> year.
>
> I suspect there might be some "middleware" that handles the models and
> dimensions and stuff and manages triggers on relational tables in PG or a
> setup like that.
> I've seen an old reference to "Cybertec OLAP", but they don't seem to carry
> a product like that if I watch their site.
>
> I'm looking for suggestions for something that would be able to do this.
>
> Cheers,
> Alban.
> --
> If you can't see the forest for the trees,
> Cut the trees and you'll see there is no forest.



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