I’m building an application with an underlying database that looks like a text-book example of OLAP: I have large amount of data that comes in every night, which then gets rolled up by time and other dimensions and hierarchies with bunch of stored procedures I wrote. Then I build my application on top of the rolled-up tables that allows user to compare/retrieve data on different dimensions and levels.
At this point, I wonder if there’s any compelling reason I should switch to a commercial BI product instead of building my own data cubes. I played with MSSQL BI and MDX, the learning curve seems very steep and I am not seeing any major performance gain. So that makes me ask myself again – what do I really gain by using a BI product? I’d appreciate if someone can help answer that question. Thanks.
MDX is a new language and certainly learning takes time and energy. Once you learn MDX you can apply it to all MDX compliant servers and you’ll be able to solve new problems quickly.
I see different advantages :
You get the power of MDX for making complex calculations (e.g. calculated members, many-to-many relationships, multiple hierarchies..)
You can assume it will better scale than your local implementation (this is arguable and depends how good you or your team is).
Certainly one of the strong points is all available reporting tools. You can connect with Excel and other standard reporting tools to your data (as example check online here to see what is possible with iccube).
We wrote a gentle introduction to MDX to help smoothing the learning curve (here).