On a related note. I was involved prototyping olap cubes (Microsoft stack) at my dayjob. <i>HUGE</i> success in terms of value added to the business. Sr Management was used to getting stale data (at <i>least</i> 24 hours old) of things like trading positions, profit/loss, alpha/beta/gamma for portfilios, etc. in <i>Excel pivot table</i> canned reports. We turned that into same-day, build-your-own reports in your web browser.<p>My group spun it off into a separate project group that took it all the way to effectively-realtime views of the entire company's money. The project rapidly became 100% mission critical and the related display framework absorbed just about every other reporting tech in the entire company. (This was in a 9billion/yr trading company with a few hundred employees)<p>So, if you're a pythonista looking to make yourself more <i>visibly</i> valuable to the management of your company. Consider taking something like this technology and running with it.
In addition to that, I've started to write a JavaScript library for the Slicer server (not mentioned in the blog post). I am just starting with JS, so pardon my style. The sources can be found here: <a href="https://github.com/Stiivi/cubes.js" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Stiivi/cubes.js</a> No examples yet, however the goal is to be able to browse aggregated data directly from JS and transform them into tables/charts.<p>Concerning backends: I have not much time to write other backends, however, if anyone is interested in helping me with them, just drop me a line. I would like to have at least nicer star-schema browser and perhaps the mongo DB backend.
Very interesting, thank you. There is a big opportunity for someone to re-imagine the power of Lotus Improv with a more intuitive touch interface for tablets. Perhaps it will be me, but I'd rather it be you than that it not happen.<p>Data analysis as a service could be a big market. Why do Google Analytics, Mint, my time-tracking service, my to-do list and every other online app I use implement their own, custom, proprietary versions of the table/sort/pivot UI for advanced use-cases? I'd rather they provided clean interfaces for easy things and allowed me to join all their data together into one data cube for serious reporting.