Client-centric OLAP on mobile devices

A client on a client-centric OLAP system is capable of performing OLAP operations on data downloaded from the OLAP server. A previous research study has shown that this concept can work very well for some common data visualization scenarios. As a proof-of-concept, a research prototype was built where the client was a web-browser on a desktop machine. In this research, our focus has shifted to mobile devices, such as a tablet, which is more resource-constrained. Our objective is to find out the pros and cons of a web-based client vis-à-vis an app-based client, i.e., one that runs on the native operating system. Two research prototypes have been built, one for each type of client, to run in a client-centric OLAP system. We compare their architectures, software implementation aspects and performance on `real life´ data. We pay special attention on how software running on mobile devices handles unusually high volume of data. We also compare the performance of app-based clients running in a client-centric and a server-centric system respectively.