You guys use excel for OLAP?? I'm curious, why not an RDBMS? I guess your data sets are small or something?
1 Answer. Very, very old and antiquated systems. We have a mainframe systems that was designed in the 80s. To get anything from the system you need access to the crystal server (which we arent allowed to play with it!!!!) so it means downloading data in a set format than using pivots and the usual excel trickery to get in a form that the cubes can work with. I have had them install access so that I can get most of the work done in queries and link in direct, but havent had time to do anything with it.
You are very right that this restricts the size of data ther cube can read from, so we end up having to freeze summary data inside the cube for all but the current peroid we are working on (hardly "online" then huh?!?!)
They are rolling SAP out across the group, but our installation target is always 2 years. It's 2 years now, was 2 years when I joined 6 months ago and the guy I worked with says it was 2 years when he joined 18 months ago!
Crap position to be in, but I've already lost a job to the recession and this place looks like a pretty safe bet until things get better.