I see Google have announced their own web application platform:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/07/google-jumps-head-first-into-web-services-with-google-app-engine/#comments
which includes BigTable as part of it (remember this post?). There’s speculation over whether Microsoft has something similar up its sleeve:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1320
This and the Panorama and Good Data stuff I blogged about over the last few weeks make me quite excited. What will the next generation of OLAP/BI tools be like? Surely it’s a mistake to think of them as hosted versions of what we’ve got today. As I’ve said before, the attribute-based approach of databases like BigTable remind me of Analysis Services dimensions; wouldn’t it be cool just to be able to grab data from a number of these stores and use them as dimensions and fact tables? Maybe through a front-end that was something like Lotus Improv (thanks to Andew Wiles for directing me to this in a recent conversation) on the web? But with an XMLA interface too? And since in the cloud hardware scale-out will presumably be just a matter of paying a bit more cash, you’d want an engine that could handle that transparently in the way I understand something like Teradata does? Ahh, if only I had a couple of million USD$s of VC funding to waste I’d hire Mosha and set him to work on this…