From Where I Sit: Virtual Cubes and Virtual Farming

By Larry Eiss

I grew up around dairy farms and have a consequent affinity for the rural life. Since childhood I have had a secret desire to have a farm of my own. Working in the software industry has intensified that desire in the last few years.

Accordingly when my wife and I decided to move away from the hectic pace of Long Island, one of the requirements for the new place was a little elbow room. We looked at many places, but on my wife’s birthday (never mind which one) in January of 2000 we found the perfect place. The views were great, it had a pond (one of her desires), it had a great shop where I could putter around, and it had land – 57 acres of it. As we walked around the place we were awestruck. It had all the "must-haves" and nearly all the "nice-to-haves" on our list.

I immediately bought a tractor with a snowplow so that I’d be able to keep the driveway passable in the winter. The tractor had to be a real farm machine so that it could take all kinds of attachments. Once we were settled, the hunt for farm implements began.

I’d "need" a hay baler of course, and a rake, and a cutter. A dirt plow would let me work the land, but I’d also need a harrow – disc would be preferable but spring-tooth would do. The list went on. My wife meanwhile dreamt of sheep, or goats; and maybe a cow and a few chickens. We’d be regular farmers!

I like the idea so much that I usually bring the tractor down from the barn to the house on weekends in the warmer months. It’s not that I need the tractor handy, I just want an excuse to drive it at least a couple of times each week. I look for reasons to plow the ground and fit the plowed section with the old spring-tooth harrow my father had lying around for some unknowable reason. I’d bale hay if I had the requisite cutter and rake. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

My virtual farm brings to mind something a number of Business Intelligence tool vendors like to tout these days – virtual cubes. Virtual cubes are simply a query answer set held in memory for near-immediate access. Like my farm, these cubes sound like a great thing to have. Data analysis should be a breeze with this setup. What could be better than having all your data right at your fingertips?

To have my farm I have to commute two and a half hours each way every day. To have my farm I have to make a strong commitment to mowing eight acres of lawn and cutting fallen trees and myriad other chores. To complicate matters, I leave home around 4:45 each morning and never return earlier than 7 p.m.; often it’s 8 p.m. That leaves weekends and the occasional hour or so at night. I barely have time now. If I had animals or the farm became an income vehicle, I simply couldn’t keep up.

So it is with virtual cubes. They "demo" very well. Response times are essentially nonexistent. The problems show up when they are put into production. Virtual cubes live in memory on the client PC, where resources are limited. When deployed in a browser-only environment, they are stored in browser-allocated memory, an even more constrained location. This is fine for a small amount of data, but real-world production reporting – even analytical reporting – often yields a much larger result. When the result of a report request is too large to fit in the allocated space, the outcome can only be bad.

WebFOCUS Release 5 sports a greatly enhanced adapter for Essbase and improved hierarchy support for other structured data. This new functionality is integrated into the Financial Reporting Platform and the result is easy creation of complex financial reports such as consolidated P&Ls. One of the best aspects of this new offering is that unlike my virtual farm or some vendors’ virtual cubes, the solution is scalable.

It’s fun to play on my virtual farm, and it’s fun to watch demos with virtual cubes, but scalability is the key to success in a production environment. From where I sit, everything else is just a hobby.