Update to Thriller MDX over JDBC driver

I made a few adjustments and fixes to the experimental Thriller MDX over JDBC driver I have been playing with off and on. As a quick recap, Thriller is a normal JDBC driver that essentially passes MDX queries straight through to an Essbase server, and then maps the results into a normal JDBC ResultSet using a set of provided “hints” that tell it how to make George Spofford cry flatten the results.

There were a couple of issues related to how queries with various CrossJoins were handled that should now be fixed. Additionally, there are now a couple of new options to provide more configurability over how tuples are split or joined together. Things are definitely getting interesting for this concept.

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Playing with the Thriller MDX/JDBC Driver in Drillbridge

Last week I talked about a new side project, which is a JDBC driver called Thriller for executing MDX queries against Essbase and mapping the results back into a normal relational database. And at the time, I said that this driver had some really interesting use cases, such as in Dodeca, Drillbridge, ODI, and other tools that work with JDBC drivers.

Speaking of Drillbridge – in the very near future I will be sharing Drillbridge’s official future direction, which I think is really exciting, but more on that later. In the meantime, let’s drop this baby into Drillbridge and see what happens!

The following walkthrough of using Thriller with Drillbridge will show off some features that are only available in the licensed version of Drillbridge, although this should in theory work with Drillbridge Community Edition (the free edition of Drillbridge), assuming you have the Thriller driver JAR file.

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Running MDX queries through a JDBC driver (for fun?)

So there I am, sitting in front of the Alaska Airlines gate at Boston Logan airport, waiting for my flight home to Seattle. It’s not a particularly glamorous terminal – the divorce from Delta hasn’t been too kind to Alaska at BOS; Delta seems to have kept the house and kids while Alaska microwaves Lean Cuisine on a futon in its bachelor pad…

As I’m pondering why there are white rocking chairs in the terminal, my phone rings with a familiar name: Mr. Brian Marshall. We catch up and exchange pleasantries before pivoting over to more important matters (all things EPM of course!).

Brian: “So… Vess.”

Jason: “Oh boy…”

So we get to talking about accessing Essbase data through a Java database driver, á la Vess. And we get to talking about running MDX queries and dumping the output – á la Camshaft.

And as the talk goes on I end up saying something stupid like this: “You know what might work? Jjust pass an MDX query through the driver over to Essbase and map the output to a fake table… It’d be like an unholy combination of Vess and Camshaft. You could probably knock it out in a day or two.”

And at that moment I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist opening my laptop for the five plus hour flight home. Continue Reading…