JSR-69 aka The Java OLAP Interface

When you hear the word OLAP what comes first to your mind? For me, it's a few things like business intelligence, analytics, multidimensional querying. In other words, these what consists an Online Analytical Process(OLAP), it's different from OLTP(Online Transaction Process). In OLTP we have many players, the RDBMS vendors, the ORM Solution vendors etc. The OLAP today is still dominated by two known vendors, Hyperion Solutions and Cognos (known for their Powerplay and Impromptu tools).

Why is OLAP important? Obviously, business intelligence is the key to survival of any enterprise. The ability to mine and analyze data in the shortest period of time makes the difference between success or failure. Well, as I see it, the most exaggerated application of OLAP is from a popular TV program called '24'. You can see how Jack Bauer and his aides analyze tons of information in the shortest time and take only what make sense to accomplish their jobs with minimal "loss of life". These are the kind of stuff where you can't bet your life on Hibernate. For one, it doesn't fit although some freaks will try to force it just to prove the point but it's not going to happen.

Enter Java OLAP Interface. Spearheaded by Hyperion, this is one of the JSR worth watching for. Why is there a need for JOLAP? According to the spec site, "...The ultimate goal of JOLAP is to provide for OLAP systems what JDBC did for relational databases." How many OLAP systems are there in the market? Most visible, two.

JDO is the most suitable partner for this specification because its multi-querying goes naturally with JOLAP. Itching for an open JOLAP?

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