Complete OLAP infrastructure without Microsoft Analysis Services, parts 1-3

Few weeks spent in the OLAP world searching for answer for following question: How to be able to do OLAP with no additional tools available?

Specifically: are we able to build a full OLAP infrastructure for clients who do not have Microsoft Analysis Services or any other enterprise OLAP severs?

For few last years our company used Microsoft Excel to perform online analysis of the relational data. As you know, Excel's capable of building pivot tables for any kind of relational data. There are three problems with Excel:

• it does not scale well (usually, several hundred thousands of records in the data source is enough to kill Excel)
• it does not like to be executed inside the application server (due to security and scalability reasons)
• you do rely on Excel and this can be too much for some clients

Read more:

• Complete OLAP infrastructure without Microsoft Analysis Services, part 1
• Complete OLAP infrastructure without Microsoft Analysis Services, part 2
• Complete OLAP infrastructure without Microsoft Analysis Services, part 3