Thursday, October 27, 2011

A tale of Mondrian and real time analytics

Back in April 2008, Julian Hyde, founder of Mondrian, extends a basic API to control the contents of member caches within the Mondrian OLAP engine. Its name, quite unsurprisingly, is CacheControl.There is a basic implementation available, yet that feature remains mostly unknown to most of the community.

Jump to December 2010. We are brainstorming on Mondrian 3.3 (today this feels like ages ago). We come up with those crazy ideas about enterprise integration, real time analytics and cool APIs / SPIs. One of these crazy ideas is: Wouldn't it be sweet to update Mondrian's member cache and do real time OLAP?

That's when we remember the old CacheControl API.