Installing the Open Source Xavier XML/A client on icCube OLAP suite

IcCube is a relatively young Swiss company specialized in creating OLAP software products. Their flagship product is the icCube Suite, providing an OLAP server, an XML for Analysis service, and a bunch of browser-based client tools for modeling cubes and dimensions, and for querying, reporting and visualizing OLAP data.

When you download the icCube trial edition, you'll get a java web server with an already deployed instance of the icCube java web application. This set-up makes it super-easy to install any browser-based third party XML/A clients for icCube.

In this blog post I want to provide you with the instructions to deploy the ad-hoc OLAP query tool called Xavier directly on your icCube server. This allows you to do ad-hoc, drag 'n drop style reporting on any data exposed by the icCube server.

If you like, you can watch the video below to see how it's done. Detailed, step-by-step instructions appear in writing right below the video.

• Go to the icCube download site. Find the appropriate version for your operating system, and click it to download the installer.
• After downloading the icCube installer, run it. This will install icCube for you.
• Download xavier.zip.
• Unpack xavier.zip. Move the extracted xavier directory to web directory below the icCube home directory
• Start icCube.

If all goes well you should now be able to navigate to xavier. If you installed icCube locally and kept the default ports, this would be the link: http://localhost:8282/xavier/resources/html/index.html

I hope this was useful for you!

Proposals for Codebits.EU

Codebits is an annual 3-day conference about software and, well, code. It's organized by SAPO and this year's edition is to be held on November 10 thru 12 at the Pavilhão Atlântico, Sala Tejo in Lisbon, Portugal.

I've never attended SAPO Codebits before, but I heard good things about it from Datacharmer Giuseppe Maxia. The interesting thing about the way this conference is organized is that all proposals are available to the public, which can also vote for the proposals. This year's proposals are looking very interesting already, with high quality proposals from Giuseppe about database replication with Tungsten replicator, Pentaho's chief of data integration Matt Casters about Kettle (aka Pentaho data integration), and Pedro Alves from webdetails who will be talking about "Big Data" analysis and dashboarding work he did for the Mozilla team.

There are many more interesting talks, and you should simply check out the proposals for yourself and give a thumbs up or a thumbs down according to whether you'd like see a particular proposal at the conference. I decided to send in a few proposals as well:

• MQL-to-SQL: a JSON-based query language for RDBMS access from AJAX applications


• DataVault and Anchor Modeling: Methods for auditable and agile Data Warehousing


• Xmla4js: Online Analytical Processing and Business Intelligence for web applications

So, if you like what you see here, take a minute to vote and shape this codebits conference. I'm hoping to meet you there!