OLAP

At work we have a system that's built on top of a proprietary OLAP database system (Rocket Gentia). We're looking into replacing that system with something that's still supported and in such a way that we can also access the data from our reporting software (WebFOCUS by information builders).

Because I'm always advocating PG, I was asked whether PG would be suitable for this, but I'm not really familiar enough with OLAP databases to be able to comment on that.

I got three prerequisites for a solution, namely:

1. It must contain correct information,

2. It must be fast and

3. It must be easy to maintain the data and the models; that's a task for a 3rd party back-end application, but it would be helpful to be able to name something to the higher-ups.

Next to that, because we're also going to access the system using our reporting software (which is read-only access), it would be best if the entire data model and all the business rules are stored inside the database so that we're looking at the data in the same way that the "back-end" sees it.

For size, we're looking at about 20 years of sales and shipment data all over the world (although mostly in Europe) for about 5mln sold products per year.

I suspect there might be some "middleware" that handles the models and dimensions and stuff and manages triggers on relational tables in PG or a setup like that.

I've seen an old reference to "Cybertec OLAP", but they don't seem to carry a product like that if I watch their site.