My company currently uses CSV files along with Excel (Pivot Tables) as a reporti

Question

My company currently uses CSV files along with Excel (Pivot Tables) as a reporting instrument. We export CSV from our invoicing system (which is based on MSSQL, so we have MSSQL Server running, just a note).

Time has come for some upgrade because annual base is already 1 million rows. Excel can only import 1 million rows and slows down on some operations at that amount.

I want to have an OLAP Server so that users (approx 10 people) can connect directly from Excel to that server and create Pivot Tables without hassle.

Preferably free/opensource solution.

Explanation / Answer

I have used Palo OLAP with Palo for Excel. Wasn't very practical or fast tho.

I have tried Pentaho also. Until version 4.8, not practical at all - too many configs, a simple change in the underlying data structure (or DBMS config) required lots of changes on the software config. Pentaho 5 simplified this very much, but I still feel like having too much work for little gain. Plus it is a bit of a bloatware.

If you are abandoning Excel for a Pentaho, it's worth to look into ART - A Reporting Tool. It's a minimalist reporting package, that with some config can talk to Pentaho's Mondrian server, and provide OLAP. I didn't get any further than a 3 minutes test drive of this functionality, so can't really recommend it.

Currently, when Excel won't cut it, I just use professional data science tools for everything. SPSS, R and Python (over SQL Server) are my favorites.

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