Posts Tagged ‘OLAP’
The early days of BI
In the article The origins of today’s OLAP products, Nigel Pendse chronicles the history of OLAP (On-line Analytical Processing), tracing the ancestry of the technology as far back as 1962.
Personally, my introduction to BI (Business Intelligence) technologies doesn’t go back quite as far. In the late 1980’s, I worked for a systems integrator, developing and supporting COBOL applications software. Around this time, we noticed that our customers were increasingly spending time and money on reporting tools and report development.
At the time, we used report writer (designer/generator) tools. Sophisticated users generated report specifications using the designer; the generator tools translated the report specifications into COBOL that could be compiled and executed to produce reports. These tools seemed to work pretty well, and they certainly were a big improvement over hand coding. The main problem, as we soon learned, was that report writers generated reports - and lots of them. So it wasn’t long before I found myself standing before an customer’s executive committee to explain why they had four “green bar” sales reports for February in hand, none of them matching, and all of them “wrong”!
Upon investigation, I came to suspect that the reports didn’t jive because: