olap4j tutorial

Behold! I finally had some time to put the finishing touches to my tutorial for olap4j. It took a year but here it is. Sorry for the delay. I know, I know. I promised it a year ago, but a lot of stuff has been going on since then. Two new jobs, two moving to a different city (and once more next month...). So without further delay, enjoy!

http://olap4j-demo.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/Olap4j_Introduction_An_end_user_perspective.pdf

Olap4j and XML/A - One more step towards a true olap systems integration API

I've been working for a month now on some enhancements to the Olap4j project to make it more powerful and compatible. The good news is, I succeeded. The previous version, 0.9.5, lacked some basic functionalities which you would expect from a production ready XML/A driver.

For one, it's HTTP proxy didn't support cookies. his was a big problem since the myriad of requests required to populate Olap4j's meta data objects each created a new user session on the web service back-end. This was a no-no, but now it's fixed and kicking ass.

I also worked on a SOAP query cache. This is was a big piece of software engineering, since I'm not used to thread safe coding. Thread safe thignys are usually in the lower levels of BI application servers and those issues are tackled from the start. Thanks to Java's java.util.concurrent package, this was a breeze.

Those changes are not part of any release nor in the SVN yet. I'm still waiting for peer review before the whole commit, but for people eager to see what it looks like, I've created a neat little package for y'all.

Now I can move back to my next release of the University of Montreal's Pentaho platform... all work and no play makes Luc a dull boy.

Cheers !