Following on from reports last year that Simba Technologies had built a 2005-flavour OLEDB for OLAP provider for Oracle’s OLAP option, here are some more details:
http://blogs.simba.com/simba_technologies_ceo_co/2009/02/mdx-query-language-support-for-oracle-olap-11g.html
and here’s a slide deck on it:
http://www.simba.com/docs/Oracle-OLAP-MDX-Driver.pdf
One other interesting point made on their slides is that they’re planning to do the same thing for Cognos and SAP/Business Objects too.
I found at least one mistake in their presentation. At slide 31 it says: "We know MDX better than anyone". Clearly this is overstatement. For the Cognos and SAP/BO connection on slide 35 – I think this is about client side, not server side, i.e. they got Excel working through their ODBO provider, and now they will try other clients.
Yes, I agree it looks like the Cognos and SAP/BusObj support will be through the client side – in the same way as their Oracle support relies on translating MDX to SQL for Oracle.