Accessing and steering the elastic OLAP cloud

A typical cloud platform provides capability of scalability, elasticity and fault tolerance. Moreover, it is designed to deal with high volumes of data on nearly unlimited number of machines. On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), a kernel part of modern decision support systems, allows interactive analysis of multidimensional data of varied granularity. A combination of the Cloud Computing and OLAP technologies brings challenges in providing OLAP analysis services in distributed environments. This paper first presents an overview of our on-going research of Elastic OLAP Cloud Platform. Then it introduces our design and implementation of a multi-tier client system, which on one hand interacts with the Elastic OLAP Cloud platform, provides Web based Graphical User Interfaces for administration of virtual OLAP cubes and performing OLAP analysis queries, and on the other hand, interacts with the OGSA-DAI middleware to access heterogeneous data sources and load integrated data into the Elastic OLAP Cloud platform. The communication between the client and the platform is based on our home-grown OLAP Modeling Markup Language (OMML), which is also presented in this paper.