Certainly, I agree. For me, two fundamental mistake Oracle made with the OLAP Option was to firstly get rid of SNAPI, and secondly, not support MDX or XML/A.

If they’d have supported SNAPI, if only for legacy reasons, all the OFA, OSA and Objects customers could have easily migrated from Express Server to Oracle OLAP; Oracle would have preserved much of their market share and opened up these customers to the wider benefits of OLAP embedded in the database (Java access, scalability etc).

If they’d have supported MDX or XML/A (as well as SQL access, I’m not saying that’s not useful) then the OLAP Option would have been opened up to all the third-party OLAP applications. SQL access is useful, but you lose the richness of the OLAP dimensional model, and you cut yourself off from the rest of the OLAP market.

The OLAP Option is a great product technically, but it’ll never get the market share back (if it can ever, now) whilst as you say, the partner ecosystem is so small. Oracle could address this issue now by opening up the OLAP server to XML/A at least, but I guess politically, that’ll never be an option. Shame.

Good to hear from you

Mark

I´ve been working with oracle olap products, since the’old blue screen’ from express server. One of the keys of a succeed OLAP product is a front end tool.

In that times, you had OSA, OFA, Objects and so on.

But now, the problem to spread AW is front-end tools. For instance, you have more than 30 front end tools from different vendors, to access AS cubes.

With AS, you have Discoverer, but do you know about many other tools to access AW cubes?

I think, we have not enough partner ecosystem to extend yne use of AW.

Thanks in advance,
Emilio
http://www.TodoBI.com