olap4j

I’ve just come across olap4j (http://www.olap4j.org/) which might be of interest for anyone out there working with Java to access OLAP cubes – as the website says, it’s like JDBC for OLAP (and so I guess you can also say it’s like ADOMD.Net for Java). It’s designed to work with a range of OLAP servers including AS2005. The interesting thing about it for me isn’t the cross-platform support, though, but that it in addition to support for MDX it will have an API for programmatically generating queries – something that I think would be useful to have in Microsoft’s own data access layer. Implemented correctly it would take away the need for programmers to have to learn about how to write efficient MDX and hopefully bring about a kind of standardisation of queries which would make writing calculations on the cube easier.