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A comment on The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube. Parent comment

Re:The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube by Merick on Thursday January 30, 2020 @09:33AM (#22191505)
+1 for Apache Kylin, it's a great project and awesome open source community. If anyone is curious about what modern OLAP is capable of, check it out.

If you want an alternative take on where OLAP is today and what it is capable of, I usually recommend this article: https://kyligence.io/blog/olap-analytics-is-dead-really/

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Re:The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube by shadowsun7 on Thursday January 30, 2020 @10:54PM (#22198879)
There are huge problems with that piece. For starters, OLAP != OLAP cube. Columnar databases and OLAP cubes are both designed for OLAP workloads. They are simply different architectures. Therefore, it is impossible to argue that 'OLAP is dead' — it cannot be dead, because OLAP is simply a type of database usage.

At this point you might say, "oh, OLAP cubes refer to an abstraction, it can be implemented using columnar stores!" — and I would point you to 40 years worth of academic research that stretches back to the early 80s. The OLAP cube or data cube refers to a specific type of data structure. It just so happens that vendors like to use the term 'OLAP cube' even when they are using a columnar engine under the hood, because it sells well.

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