Design And Application Of An OLAP System Based On J2EE

In recent years, the information technology and enterprises' management have been keeping on developing rapidly. Accordingly, enterprises wish to be more aware of their operation. That is why the OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) technology was brought forward. Looking back on the history of OLAP development, we can see that, at the beginning, this technology was implemented in the "fat-client" mode which however was not convenient to use. After that, the virtual "thin-client" mode was conceived, in which the plug-in technology was applied. But even the thin-client mode can not avoid the disadvantages of the "fat-client" mode. Therefore, the research in client-side OLAP on became a hotspot. As we all know, OLAP technology should act the functions of drilling down, slicing, pivoting and so on. In this article, a design of a general OLAP system based on J2EE architecture is conceived.There are a few meaningful attempts in this article on both designing and implementing an OLAP system with J2EE architecture:1. Designing a software frame of OLAP engine and using XML technology as the basis of metadata storage. With this design, the problem occurred during the process of metadata exchanging can be solved.2. Applying MDX (Multi Dimensional Expressions) standard for the design in order to provide data support to some popular client tools for OLAP.3. Optimizing the system by cube storage technology to increase the OLAP performance while the data amount is not large.