OLAP and Models / ActiveRecord etc etc

Rails
1

How would you handle reporting on an OLAP database?

I have no issues whatsoever using the Rails ActiveRecord way of doing
things for my OLTP setup, but for OLAP it “seems” (I haven’t tried it
yet) to be one heck of a bunch of overhead.

Then again if there’s a way to have a series of related tables in a star
schema like customer_dimension -> sales_facts <- time_dimension; and
just execute a query with my aggregate functions / groupings and then
find a Model to map the ResultSet to I’d be home free. Seems to me
straight to the DB could accomplish this easily.

Now to end all this, I am aware of the ActiveWarehouse ‘plugin’ to
rails… it’s interesting, I’m just curious if people are foregoing
ActiveRecord for OLAP solutions and going straight to the DB.

2

Our app has an OLAP aspect within an OLTP app. The schema is a
standard star schema.

For many things we use custom SQL to get subqueries for the
aggregates. For data management we use AR.

Michael