Mondrian Lends OLAP To Pentaho Open-Source BI

The Mondrian On-Line Analytical Processing project, an open-source OLAP initiative, joined forces with open-source business intelligence software entrant Pentaho, making itself a "permanent part" of the Pentaho BI project, the organizations said Thursday.

Mondrian OLAP Server supports the aggregation, calculation and categorization of data from relational databases. Originally released in 2002, the server works with Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2, among others.

Pentaho's ambitious BI initiative is designed to provide reporting, analysis, dashboards, workflow and data mining capabilities. It lacks an extract, transform and load (ETL) framework. The initiative was founded by former executives from Cognos, Hyperion, IBM, Oracle, SAS and others.

Mondrian uses the Eclipse Java development environment as its graphical editor for building OLAP models. It implements MDX -- the OLAP query language -- and works with XML for Analysis and JOLAP specifications.

Pentaho claims to be a less expensive alternative to traditional BI vendors such as Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion.