Flexmonster Pivot Table Component Blog

When it comes to cost-effective deployment of BI tool, Pentaho Analysis Services Community Edition (aka Mondrian) is one of the choices, selected by many analytics, developers and business owners. The Mondrian server enables users to load large quantities of data real-time and get insight with complex analytical queries.

Today, rapid analysis of big data is crucial for efficient business decisions. By year 2015, according to Gartner research, the companies who have implemented fast big data management and analysis will begin to win over their unprepared competitors by 20% in every available financial metric that is critical to run their businesses.

FlexMonster Pivot Table Component can connect traditional databases like MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and others very similarly as it can get connected to OLAP servers. The main underlying concept is using a simple script in PHP, C# or practically any platform that would connect database, load the data and pass it to Pivot Table as CSV.

Today, it is very usable if your application speaks all languages to user and has complete international support. Doing localization as seamless as possible is one of the tasks we have implemented in a convenient way for Flexmonster Pivot integration developers.

The localization terms are easily accessible via the flexmonster/local.english.xml file. The file can be used to create new translation of the common terms, used in the application. Just make copy of a file and call it as you like, e.g. flexmonster/local.deutsch.xml. Translate the terms and here you go - now you are ready to push in the localized version of your Pivot Table! Don't forget to mention the newly created localization file in the configuration XML file of your report as well.

Getting the Pivot Table connected to OLAP source is critical when you need demo to be up and running in minutes. The component is able to connect Microsoft® SQL Server Analysis Services® or Pentaho® Analysis Services (Mondrian) and now you can even verify the connectivity right from the tool.

The improved Flexmonster Pivot Table API helps out with connecting to OLAP faster. With updated functions, reading out data source information and troubleshooting the connectivity to OLAP server becomes easier than ever.

Pivot Table provides essential tools for formatting that are user-friendly and fully Excel-like. You can now make your data even more visible and robust with updated formatting API.

The updated formatting ability has now control over font size, font face, the text color and cell background color.

Along with new features of v1.5 like calculated fields, the updated cell formatting feature gives Flexmonster Pivot table even more visibility and robustness. Stay tuned!

Calculated fields becomes an important instrument to visualize OLAP cube data as it is required by certain business task. Sometimes values are not stored in the format that would be best visible.

Flexmonster is about to release a brand new version of the Pivot Table & Charts component, version 1.5. One of the features we are proud of is ability to apply conditional formatting, right as most users used to do in Microsoft Excel.

Conditional formatting empowers ability to focus even more on the trends and information that has to bring attention.

Welcome back! In this post we continue comparing Flexmonster Pivot Table & Charts component to current best offerings on the market.

When it comes to OLAP data analysis and multi-dimensional reporting, a fast and web accessible pivot table control is a target for most business users. A charting module becomes an essential part of the solution as a daily insight into business intelligence facts provides unrivaled advantage to traditional Excel Pivot tools.

Performance and accessibility are key features to productive analysis tools. Flexmonster Pivot Table & Charts component was designed to suite optimal performance on a large scale of data (up to 100Mb and 1M of records!) and ready for use on Android-based tablets.

Regardless of the common daily tasks, the right solution would give you a quick and efficient perspective on critical information rather then plunging you into a dull tasks of compiling a number of useless traditional reports.

In the previous post we gave a brief look over the short list of OLAP data visualization tools and components over the market. Today we will compare the most popular offerings on the market as well as evaluate them versus critical aspects for each business decision maker.

These we consider as important aspects for business intelligence facts analysis. The list also serves as a legend for our comparison table.

• Complete data view visibility - ability to load and visualize complete data without paging or lengthy load. Display full dataset loaded from acquired datasource whether it's OLAP Cube, SQL Database, CSV file or traditional Excel table.
• Expandable hierarchical data display - ability to drill up and down the hierarchical data, expand or collapse child groups to see more summarized or raw reports. Show table or OLAP cube data as an expandable tree, hierachichies by rows and columns, nested grids and complete OLAP drill-through.
• Interactive drillable pivot charts - ability to drill-down data interactively through line chart, scatter chart, bar chart or cylinder chart while being in charts mode. Ability switch between charts or table modes on the fly. Support of readable tooltips and legend information. Support of simultaneous view of charts and cube table data.
• Modify report layout - users can easily change a report's layout visually and examine data from different perspective on the fly: decide which dimensions should be placed to rows, columns or filter-area; select an aggregation of the values to see well-consolidated reports; perform aggregations such as Sum, Count, Average, Min, Max, Product, Percent; format values as currencies and/or decimal places/separator.
• Analyze data - support all kinds of data operation including cube data filter, OLAP data filter with search, filter on multiple fields, summary of cube table, data column sort, data row sort, select top N data records from sorted table to focus relevant data only, group rows or columns.
• Save/Load views - the component/solution should support saving reports to local hard drive or to the server. The saved reports have exactly the same layout, number formatting, filters, sorting as in the original report.

Stay tuned as we will continue comparing Flexmonster Pivot Table and Charts component to current offerings on the market in our next post.

Pivot table is a popular feature many can find in Microsoft Excel and use to analyze interactively large mass of facts. The robustness of this analysis type allows many to extract trends and patterns that are located inside the data. Pivot table allows you to organize and summarize this information, focus only on the most relevant data and extract the most meaningful business analysis facts.

As the office software moved into cloud with Google Docs and similar applications, a global necessity of web applications that are capable to analyse OLAP cubes has risen. Our team has prepared our own short list on other available OLAP Data Mining and cross-tab reporting tools available currently on the market.

OLAP Data Grid Visualizing Components

• Flexmonster Pivot Table & Charts - Full featured Pivot component developed by our team - we highly recommend it.
• ASPxPivotGrid - An ASP.NET AJAX component for visulizing and charting OLAP data.
• XCelsius (aka Crystal Dashboard) - a Flex-based component for SAP Business Objects reporting and visualization.
• xamPivotGrid - a Silverlight OLAP pivot grid component from Infragistics that works with multidimensional data (MDX) from cubes, data warehouses, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services.
• viblend DataGrid Control - another Silverlight OLAP grid component with traditional data grid controls, hierarchical grids and Excel-like pivot tables.
• Ranet OLAP - an open-source Silverlight based OLAP grid control written specifically for SQL Server Analysis Services.
• DXPivotGrid - a WPF component for OLAP Data Mining, Cross-tab reporting with compact and summarized visual reports and charts.
• ComponentOne OLAP - a Silverlight based component from ComponentOne that provides analytical processing with Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables feel and Pivot Charts with ability for drag-and-drop of views.
• Essential BI Grid - a Silverlight component, which is part of the full BI package that able to summarize, analyze, explore, and present summaries for critical data in your enterprise and make informed decisions. Data source support ranges from SQL Server Analysis Services to any XMLA-compatible OLAP databases like Mondrian.
• PNN Pivot Table Light - a lightweight DHTML code for rendering pivot tables. Allows drag-n-drop and drill up/down operations in browser over the table.

Complete Solutions for OLAP Web Applications

• JIDE Pivot Grid - a Java/Swing implementation of the famous PivotTable feature as you can find in Microsoft Office Excel as well as many other analytic and OLAP applications.
• AJAX OLAP Browser - Dundas offers an AJAX-based OLAP browser (charts and grid) as part of the greater dashboard visualization data application.

In the next posts we will compare Flexmonster's Pivot Table and Charts component versus most popular offerings on the market. Stay tuned!

Today we will talk about common troubles when you try to connect to OLAP cube with Pivot Table & Charts component. Feel free also to use our SQL Analysis Services Diagnostics Tool to verify the connectivity.

I get a "Invalid datasource or catalog." error.

Please check back on the Catalog and Cube fields as one of them may be leading to the non-existing resource.

I get a "Error #2032" error.

You have to verify your XMLA-enabled OLAP cube server is up and responds fine. The easiest way is to first verify the server is available by http, so you may open the direct URL up in the browser:

• For Pentaho Analysis Services (Mondrian) - http://localhost:8080/mondrian/xmla
• For Microsoft SQL Analysis Services - http://localhost/olap/msmdpump.dll

Please note that your bindings may vary so check carefully. If the URL try gives a fail, you might need to configure server to accept XMLA connections. The following links might be useful:

• MS OLAP - http://business-intelligence.phi-integration.com/2008/04/testing-mondrian-as-xmla-provider.html
• Pentaho Mondrian - http://business-intelligence.phi-integration.com/2008/04/testing-mondrian-as-xmla-provider.html

My browser tells there's a permission problem connecting to OLAP data source.

If you run the Pivot table component from your local drive we advise copying it to any web server where it will be accessible via http://-like URL. Running Flash applications locally often requires additional permissions.

Ideally, put crossdomain.xml file into the root of your web server when XMLA is configured. This will allow Flash applications to access and read OLAP data cube data. We advise copying the sample content of such file from here - http://www.flexmonster.com/crossdomain.xml

I get permissions error from my OLAP server.

The best way is to ensure your data source has "For everyone" permissions. In case of Microsoft OLAP - go to Management Studio, and connect to your Analysis Services. Open the Database you want to connect, then go to Roles and create a new Role with "full control" and add "Everyone" to members of this role.

With the Flexmonster pivot table component you can connect to Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (2005, 2008) or Pentaho Analysis Services (Mondrian) as well as any other business intelligence software that supports XMLA standard. Follow these simple steps to get your Pivot connected to XMLA-based OLAP cube:

1. Click "New", then select OLAP (XMLA) as your data source.