Flex Client Side OLAP For Open Source ERP Openbravo
In the last few weeks I have been working on integrating BI functionality with open source ERP. I have mostly worked with Pentaho, an open source BI suite.
What Is OLAP?
One of the major components of every BI solution is OLAP. OLAP lets you run multidimensional analysis on your operational data. The idea behind OLAP is to enable very fast multidimensional queries. These queries will answer questions such as what was my revenue in the past 12 months,grouped by region and by product group, for example. This type of queries are very intensive and resource consuming for standard operational information systems (such as E.R.P.) and can bring it to a complete halt (no shipments, no invoicing, no order entry…).
Flex, The Flash Compiler, and OLAP
I was surprised to see that Adobe Flex has OLAP functionality embedded in Flex 3. I used Flex as graphical web-services consuming client (upcoming posts will show you Flex’s strength as a SOAP client) and thought I’d give their OLAP a chance.
Flex is a very elegant and powerful flash compiler,which provides client side OLAP - that means that the actual parsing of the OLAP query,data aggregation and OLAP cube display is handled by the browser running the flash application compiled by Flex. This limits the number of rows of data you can OLAP to about 50K records. However, you can do some of the aggregation pre-processing and let Flex worry about the actual rendering of the data on the screen. Another possibility is to connect Flex to an OLAP server and let the OLAP sever do all the hard work. I’ll try to connect Flex to Pentaho’s OLAP server (Mondrian) and I’ll let you know how it went. I think it can be a great combo.
The recorded demo (which can be found inside the post, click on “Read Complete Article »»” below) shows a flash application with two OLAP views-sales by region over a period of 8 months and sales by product line over the same period. The dataset used as the source for these views was extracted from Openbravo’s database (they provide a set of sample data) using Kattle, Pentaho’s ETL tool. Since my ETL job is completely flexible, I can run the exact same multidimensional analysis on data coming from other open source ERP systems, such as Compiere,Apache OFBiz,Postbooks or Adempiere.
OLAP Sales Data Cube Flash Application Built Using Flex 3
ETL From Openbravo, FLEX OLAP On Sales Data Recorded Demo
[kml_flashembed movie="http://opensourceerpguru.com/flash/FlexOLAPOpenbravo.swf" height="710" width="995" /]
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2 Responses to “Flex Client Side OLAP For Open Source ERP Openbravo”
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great idea!!
I would like to know more about your experiment with mondrian and flex…
I had done with my dashboard, i used pentaho as analysis server and flex as data visualization, during development time i had no problem with data visualization, but the problem was appeared when i used compiled file (swf) and embed it to my web its failed to show the result, i had no idea why this happen..any suggestions?