Re: Drill-downs and OLAP type data - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Anthony Presley
Subject Re: Drill-downs and OLAP type data
Date
Msg-id CAO2Axyof=XT7ngCurtt6dTWJZEgN3kTr+VupM7Bj8kWvSjZ3UA@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Re: Drill-downs and OLAP type data  (Ondrej Ivanič <ondrej.ivanic@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: Drill-downs and OLAP type data  (Ondrej Ivanič <ondrej.ivanic@gmail.com>)
List pgsql-general
2011/10/12 Ondrej Ivanič <ondrej.ivanic@gmail.com>
Hi,

On 12 October 2011 14:50, Anthony Presley <anthony@resolution.com> wrote:
> After a few weeks of searching around, we're running into dead-ends on the
> front-end, and the back-end.  PG doesn't support OLAP / MDX .... and the GUI
> tools that do this, for the most part, require MDX / OLAP (SPSS and DB2, MS
> SQL Analytics, etc...).
> What's the PG route here?  Are there some secrets / tips / tricks / contrib
> modules for handling this?

Our db has very simple star schema and several materialised tables for
aggregates. We need OLAP style queries with OLTP performance :). After
several upgrades we ended up with 16 cores, 80GB of RAM and fast SAN
but performance wasn't good. Meanwhile we evaluated several NoSQL
solutions and several comercial MPP solutions -- and the winner is
Greenplum! (you can get CE version for free -- max two processors (but
unlimited cores) and almost no HA options). AsterData's nCluster has
very nice MapReduce integration but looks quite immature.

The *problem* with Greenplum is that it's ultra-expensive once you leave the CE version - and you're not supposed to be using the CE version for commercial usage last I read the license.  Has that changed?

The last pricing I saw was around $16k per CPU (it may have been per core?).  At that point, you're now in the realm of SQL Server Analysis and DB2 SPSS.
 
I would say that roll-ups/drill-downs/cubes sound obsolete to me :) I
suggest the following tools (list is not sorted by anything)
- RapidMiner (http://rapid-i.com/content/view/181/196/)
- Tableau (http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery)
- AlpineMiner (http://www.alpinedatalabs.com/, http://alpineminer.org/)
- Jasper (http://www.jaspersoft.com/)
- Pentaho (http://www.pentaho.com/)

Thanks, but I'm well aware of all of these packages.  Our problem is pairing up a web based GUI to a database we love using.  Doesn't seem possible, because the user-friendly OLAP / data analysis / dashboard tools are all expecting functionality that PG doesn't have.

It sounds like, we're either choosing a different DB to work with the pretty GUI tools, or writing a GUI tool to work with PG.


--
Anthony Presley

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