Simultaneous equations

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Simultaneous equations

Alan Nevill

SSC Enthusiast

Points: 184
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April 16, 2006 at 5:11 am

#117033

I have a budget model running within a 120Gb Oracle Express database. Oracle is desupporting the Express OLAP technology and I am looking for a migration path. The key part of the budget model is the solving of fairly complex simultaneous equations. Express has rich functionality in this area for example simulation type, damping factor, number of iterations, overflow etc.
Does this functionality exist in Analysis Services and if so can anyone recommend a book or information source that I can review?
Many thanks
Alan Nevill

Viewing 4 posts - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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stevefromOZ SSC-Forever Points: 43646 More actions · Answer 1

I haven't found enough time to test all of this yet but I would definitely recommend AS2005 (rather than 2000) if you're going to make the swap across. If AS2K5 is going to support this type of functionality, it will be via it's MDX Scripting (note this is not just 'simple' mdx as per the old calculated members of AS2k, it allows for scoping, recursion etc). Rob Zare & Mosha (both Msft guys, Mosha wrote large sections of the engine) have written a book covering MDX scripting which you may want to flip through prior to purchasing to see if this will assist (ie i haven't read it yet ).

re; the move away from the Express DB, is there a reason why you wouldn't move to the Analytic Server that's part of 10g?

Cheers,

Steve.

Alan Nevill SSC Enthusiast Points: 184 More actions · Answer 2

Thanks for the info Steve, I will look for the book.

re. 10g Analytic Server, I will be evaluating that as well. Do you have any info/experience of that?

Thanks again.

Alan

stevefromOZ SSC-Forever Points: 43646 More actions · Answer 3

Hi Alan,

re: 10g, no commercial experience using it's AS just personal testing & eval. My current take-aways:

i) I can't see where you'd add the complex calcs 'to the cube' but this doesn't mean it's not there. I know they're still talking about being able to do this in the front end (excel reader, possibly express front end also).

ii) I have to say I'm not impressed with the tools themselves (ie user I/F and all things GUI), they're all java [swing?](which isn't a crime) but you get used to simple things like a scrolling mouse making the scroll bars scroll. Also because it's not M$ft, they don't look windows'y in any real way. Again, not a crime and probably not too noticable if you've been using Linux and the GUI flavours that sit atop it.

I haven't spent enough time yet going through the Orcale side to really give you a strong appraisal but one person I've found who in the msft wold would be an MVP (I think he has got the Oracle equivalent) is Mark Rittman. He has a strong blog and web site full of info on all things oracle especially the BI /DW side.

Steve.