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Java OLAP Interface (JOLAP) is dead?
It looks like JOLAP is dead. The final specification has been approved on June 15th 2004. However, to this day, except for Mondrian and Xelopes, I know of no implementation of JOLAP. According this this thread, Oracle has no intention of ever supporting JOLAP.
On the other hand, Oracle doesn’t support nor does it plan to support MDX or derived technologies such as XML for Analysis (XMLA) and more recent specifications. But, you can get MDX support in Mondrian and in SQL Server standard edition or better. I am pretty sure IBM supports MDX and maybe XMLA, but with recent changes in their OLAP product line, I must admit I’m a bit confused.
This leaves us with no cross-platform OLAP query standard. After all these failed attempts, it is very depressing. Update: Daniel Guerrero from Ideasoft correctly pointed out to be that the current JOLAP spec. has not been published yet as a Final Release, but only as a Final Draft. The Final Draft has been approved in June 2004 (though IBM abstained), and normally, the Final Draft ought to be a Final Release by now, but this didn’t happen. The difference is significant because, right now, the JOLAP license, granted by Hyperion, is for evaluation purposes only. This means you can’t go out and implement JOLAP without risking legal troubles. We can imagine many scenarios on what is happening, but I’ll vote for an Intellectual Property issue.