The OLAP Council, which was formed earlier this year by four on-line analytical processing software tool suppliers (CI No 2,592), has added two European members: Holistic Systems Ltd and Planning Sciences International Ltd, both of London. The original members – Arbor Software Corp, Comshare Inc, IRI Software Inc and Pilot Software Corp – faced criticism from the likes of the Gartner Group and SAS Institute Inc that the group was simply a self-serving and closed marketing group, but it claims that further members are welcome to join. It will even welcome end-users, if they are interested. The planned on-line analytical application programming interface specification, due out by the summer, is expected to be coded into an Object Linking & Embedding object by an independent contractor, and should be ready by the end of the year. It will be useful for any Windows-based client product that needs to access data coming from an on-line analytical processing server. Although Object Linking & Embedding is the best place to start, the council is looking at alternatives for clients other than Windows. Dues for the OLAP Council are $30,000 annually, $10,000 for associate membership. On-line analytical processing – a niche within data warehousing aimed at the high-speed and flexible analysis of large volumes of data – faces increased competition from mainstream database firms such as Sybase Inc and Oracle Corp, despite objections that these products are optimised for updating rather than user access in general.
