Julian Hyde has just announced the release of version 1.0 of olap4j, the open Java API for OLAP, on his blog:
http://julianhyde.blogspot.com/2011/04/olap4j-version-10-released.html
I’ve been keeping an eye on this project not only because it allows Java developers to query Analysis Services via XMLA, but because I hope it will bring with it some good SSAS-compatible open source client tools. Out of the ones Julian mentions in his post, Saiku looks the most promising as far as I can see but when I have a spare moment I’d like to check them all out properly.
The only drawback with using olap4j with SSAS is that you need to configure http access to make it work, which is something most people don’t want to have to do. Hmm, wouldn’t it be nice if SSAS did this natively? Maybe it’s something that will come when we get SSAS in the cloud?
Chris I follow your blog which is great thank you. I am a BI developer who is launching a significant BI project on Monday next and have run into an issue with users on MACs being unable to use Excel as the client tool as it does not support OLAP. Do you know if there are any client tools that will run on a MAC and connect to SSAS cubes.
Hi Trish, probably the only one I know of is http://www.meteorite.bi/saiku though there may be other Java-based clients that use olapj4.