My first exposure to OLAP was on a team developing a front end to Essbase that semi-automated report generation after reloading the cube. Since then, I have wor

My first exposure to OLAP was on a team developing a front end to Essbase that semi-automated report generation after reloading the cube. Since then, I have worked with various OLAP technologies from Microsoft to Mondrian. I agree with Mr. Chin who is the author of this blog. OLAP cubes can scale up but not out which limits their potential size so they can't really accommodate big data scenarios. My previous company used Apache Druid instead. Druid can do a lot of what OLAP did but using a distributed approach. Although Druid does not provide tight integration with spreadsheets, it does provide near real-time ingestion, on-the-fly rollup, and first class time series analysis.