Back in 1997, when OLAP Services 7.0 was still in Beta there were no client tools to work with it. Back then I received email from far New Zeland - it was from Richard Lees, who worked in New Zeland's subsidary of Microsoft MCS. He wrote that he developed ASP based thin OLAP browser called “ThinSlicer”. ThinSlicer was available for everybody together with source code, and it was in facto the only publicly available reference implementation of thin client for OLAP cubes until another Richard, Richard Tkachuk, wrote his version called AnalysisServicesThinWebClient which was included in the
SQL Server 2000 Resource Kit. This friendly competition between two Richards went for some time. Recently, as readers of my blog are aware, Richard Tkachuk released new incarnation of his project, this time in the form of ASP.NET control called
CellSetGrid. Response from Richard Lees didn't take long. He wrote me this week, that he now also completed .NET version of
ThinSlicer, also freely available with source code. In addition, Richard also has
live demonstration of ThinSlicer working against datasets such as New Zeland census, Jim Gray's SkyServer weblogs and more. BTW, it is also showcase of Analysis Services running on Itanium2 box, and soon all of it will move to Yukon build. When
Jim Gray saw them, he said the following:
This guy in New Zeeland (Richard Lees) harvests the Skyserver weblogs from Fermilab and JHU via a webservice every hour (much as we do at http://skyserver.sdss.org/log/en/traffic/). But he puts them in an SQL OLAP cube (rather than a boring SQL tabular database). The results are stunning! very crisp and clear reports that allow us to explore (drill down into and pivot on) the 75M web hits and 13M SQL queries.