TM1 & PowerOLAP

[KSimon]

Hi All,

Does anyone have some information on how TM1 and PowerOLAP (from PARIS Technologies) stack up against each other. I am looking for some specific information, detailing some of the key differences.

Thanks in advance,
Kevin.

[Michel Zijlema]

Hi All,

Does anyone have some information on how TM1 and PowerOLAP (from PARIS Technologies) stack up against each other. I am looking for some specific information, detailing some of the key differences.

Thanks in advance,
Kevin.

Hi Kevin,

PowerOlap is similar to TM1 in the sense that it is client/server based MOLAP, has a TM1-like Excel interface to retrieve the data and a rules engine for dynamic calculations. They also have ETL functionality and a web browser. Given the history of the company it is not strange that this product is quite ‘inspired’ by TM1: the Presti brothers were distributing TM1 in (at least) Europe back in the Sinper days – after theTM1 product was sold to Applix they sold (or had to sell) their distribution rights/channels to Applix. This gave them the capital to start developing PowerOlap.

The rules language is (syntax wise) a bit different than the TM1 rules language, but the concept is more or less the same (for sparsity handling they use ‘Dependencies’, like the TM1 ‘Feeders’).

It’s been about 2 years back that I last looked at PowerOlap. Most important reason for that is that I am ‘a TM1 guy’, having enough TM1 work to fill at least five days a week for the last 2 years and (to my regret) leaving little time for looking at other tools. Other reasons had to do with the fact that the company Cubeware, from which I used their Importer product as ETL engine, stopped supporting PowerOlap (they ran into problems with the PowerOlap API and I think this was not the top development priority for PowerOlap), the time I had to invest in getting comfortable with the different rules syntax and ETL tool and the (at that moment) terrible ergonomics of the tool. Also the licensing setup (at least technically) was quite a pain at that moment.

Specific features of PowerOlap are a connection from Google docs (a Google Spreadsheet ‘add-in’) and they sell their tool in combination with (BO) Xcelcius.

I haven’t built any big models using PowerOlap, so I can’t say much about scalability. The people from PowerOlap adviced me that using their tool it (performance wise) was better to build a number of smaller cubes than one big cube (so cube segmentation and a higher level consolidation cube on top).

Hope this helps.

Michel

[KSimon]

Hi Michel,

Thanks so much for the information - I really appreciate it.

I have a few more questions if you don't mind:
# Can you explain what you mean about the terrible ergonomics?
# Do you know if PowerOLAP is 64 bit?
# Do you know about any limitations of PowerOLAP? Number of users, number of dimensions etc etc.

Regards,
Kevin.

[Michel Zijlema]

Hi Michel,

Thanks so much for the information - I really appreciate it.

I have a few more questions if you don't mind:
# Can you explain what you mean about the terrible ergonomics?

The last version I tried was 9.x (they're now on 11). In this version the dialogs to f.i. edit a subset or dimension where cumbersome at the least. It was not easy to manually edit a dimension (and get ther result you're after) and I can't remember whether I ever managed to create a subset using those dialogs...

# Do you know if PowerOLAP is 64 bit?

The last binaries to install PowerOlap that I used had '32' in their name, which could suggest there is also a '64' version. But I can't find any formal statement on this.

# Do you know about any limitations of PowerOLAP? Number of users, number of dimensions etc etc.

I'm not sure, but I think that on this point the tool is in line with TM1 (max 256 dims in a cube and bound by hardware limitations).

Michel