Online analytical processing system for students information of BUET using open source technology

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.