As soon as I’ve started digging into OLAP Architectures I realized how complicated things might become whenever looking for extra features. Most of the commercial OLAP solutions are providing “classic” OLAP features for data warehousing. It means that only simple numeric, strings and dates would be supported. Spatial Data Warehouses architectures instead, are still in their infancy and there exists no commercial product that is actually providing such SOLAP functionalities. There exists several academic proposals instead which can provide a good overview on the features that can be supported by SOLAP Servers.
One of these acedemic prototypes is Geo Mondrian.
GeoMondrian is a spatially-enabled version of Pentaho Analysis Services (Mondrian). It has been released under the EPL. GeoMondrian is the first implementation of a true SOLAP server. It provides a consistent integration of spatial objects into the OLAP data cube structure, instead of fetching them from a separate spatial database, web service or GIS file. To make a simple analogy, GeoMondrian brings to the Mondrian OLAP server what PostGIS brings to the PostgreSQL database management system.
Unfortunately the documentation and getting-started guides are missing right now… That’s why I’ve decided to publish a couple of advices to whom may decide to use GeoMondrian for developing SOLAP applications. Here attached you can find an archive that contains all that you need to setup a sample SOLAP server with geographic data source. It is designed to be working on PostgreSQL+Postigs since it is the only spatial database to be supported right now.
What you have to do in order to be able to use this unofficial build release of GeoMondrian is to load the .SQL script into your postgresql+postgis database and than run the Test application (be sure that the .XML schema definition is in the same parent directory, to have set up properly your JDBC connection and have included the libraries that are present in the “lib” folder).
I hope that it will help!
