Abstract:
The size of the databases in the organizations is increasing day by day. Consequently, the
generation of report by aggregated queries for decision making are becoming more time
consuming. But decision makers cannot wait long to get a result of an aggregated query.
To overcome this problem, Online Analytical Processing (aLAI') system is becoming
popular. It deals with tools and techniques for data analysis that can give nearly
instantaneous answers to queries requesting summarized data, even though the database
is extremely large. The typical applications of aLAI' are in business reporting for sales,
marketing, management reporting, Business Process Management (BPM), budgeting and
forecasting, financial reporting and similar areas.
All of the major commercial DBMS vendors release aLAI' software in the market, but
those are expensive for small and medium scale organizations especially in the
developing countries and there is no Open Source DBMS which includes aLAI'
facilities.
We have developed an aLAI' system using open source technologies. MySQL 5, PERL,
PHI' and Red Hat Linux were used to implement the aLAI' system. The aLAI' system
was tested on a Dell Personal Computer (PC) with 3 GHz processing speed, 256 MB or
RAM and 80 GB single IDE hard disk. The BUS speed or PC was 800 MHz. The
implemented OLAI' system reduced the time taken ror a large aggregated query rrom
38.41 seconds to 0.18 second. The system also provides a multidimensional data
representation facility at the front end. It also allows users to drill down in the hierarchy
of dimensions interactively.
