olap4j V1.0 has been released.

Back in the ’90s and early 2000’s I was involved in the attempts by the proprietary BI vendors to create common standards. Anyone remember JOLAP? The vendors were doing this only because of increasing demand and frustration from their customers – none of them actually these standards. Why? Because, in the short term, standards would only help the customers and the implementers, not the vendors. These efforts were hugely political with many of the vendors taking the opportunity to score points against each other. The resulting ‘standards’ were useless, and none of the large vendors were willing, or able, to support them.

How refreshing, then, to have olap4j reach the 1.0 milestone – http://www.olap4j.org. Created by consumers and producers of open source BI software, olap4j shows the advantage of open collaboration by motivated parties. Already olap4j has a Mondrian driver, and an XMLA driver for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, SAP BW, and Jedox Palo. There are also several clients who use olap4j servers, some from Pentaho, and Saiku, Wabit, and ADANS.

olap4j is very cool stuff. You can read more on Julian Hyde’s blog. Congratulations for everyone that has worked on olap4j.