Compare Pivot Table and Chart Components for OLAP. Part 1

Volodymyr Yatsevsky posted on November 17th, 2011

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.

	Flexmonster Pivot	Flex OLAPDataGrid	Panorama	SAIKU
Features for end-user (business users analyzing & creating reports online)
Complete data view visibility	+	+	+	+
Expandable hierarchical data display	+	-	+	-
Instant data load on tree expand	+	-	-	-
Interactive drillable pivot charts	+	+	+	-
Modify report layout	+	-	+	+
Analyze data: filter, sort, group, top-10	+	-	-	-
Save & load report views	+	-	+	+
Print & exports: PDF, Excel, HTML, CSV or image	Excel, PDF, HTML, CSV, PNG	-	Google-only	Excel
Features for web-developers (integrators)
Data source load	Up to 100Mb	1Mb (est.)	1Mb (est.)	1Mb (est.)
Customizable look & feel	+	-	-	-
Copy-to-server deployment (no install)	+	+	-	-
Web application support	+	+	-	+
SQL/CSV support	+	-	+	-
OLAP/XMLA cubes support	+	-	+	+
Development platform	Adobe Flash (AS 3.0)	Adobe Flex	HTML/AJAX	HTML/AJAX

 

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