PostGeoOLAP / News: Recent posts

The whole thing works as follows:
1) you should design and implement your data warehouse on a postgresql database (that is: a Fact Table and its dimensions, as stated by Kimball's star model - do not forget the foreign key in the fact Table related to the dimensions)
2) This data warehouse (DW) will be populated with data from your transactional databases (you should get a loader or a some other tool in order to copy and transform data from your production databases to your DW)
3) Using postgeoolap, you will connect to your populated DW, and:
3.1 - Define a Fact Table and its numeric measures (the attributes you would like to summarize or aggregate)
3.2 - Define, one-by-one, the dimensions of the cube, and for each dimension you must define the hierarchy level of the attributes (e.g: state-city-street)
4) After the definitions stated in 3), your Cube is completely designed, and you should process the Cube so postgeoolap can generate aggregations, that is, create some new tables that will speed up the queries you will make.
5) After the Cube is processed, you can go to the analysis screen in order to query your data. In the Analysis screen, you are able to pick up (by double-clicking on a TreeView) the attributes of interest, and then when you are done, postgeoolap will display the results you requested on a JTable, and the geographical results (if any) will be displayed on a map (note that the visualization of the geographical resultas is still not finished in version 0.8.2 of postgeoolap).... read more

After a long period, postgeoolap 0.8.2 is released. This is the first java version(the .Net version is discontinued) of the tool. Almost everything is functional, except the visualization of the geographical results on a map (this will be implemented using JUMP). Using postgeoolap as a conventional OLAP (Rolap) tool is now OK.

We've released a HOW-TO (initially in Brazilian portuguese) on PostGeoOlap, with a real-life example, explaining step-by-step how to use the spatial olap tool. See details at: Using PostGeoOlap (http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=23269&group_id=107278)

PostGeoOlap version 0.80 is the first public release of the PostGeoOlap project. Initially developed in VB.Net and using PlanetGis (an excellent GIS tool, available at http://www.planetgis.co.za\) as a visualization component, PostGeoOlap is part of a Master Thesis and integrates in an unique tool all functionalities of a GIS and an OLAP application. The application is in fact a Spatial Olap tool and works on top of PostGreSQL + PostGIS, providing the analytical (conventional) results on a spreadsheet and the geographical results on a map. We're now porting the source code from .Net to Java.