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Testing the Mondrian XML/A Provider

Last month I got a call out of the blue from Nick Goodman. Nick had enjoyed reading the ThinOLAP blog and wanted to find out more. During our conversation, Nick told me about the open-source Mondrian PTS and XML/A server. Well, I was shocked and amazed. Shocked that such a think existed and that I didn't know about it. Amazed because Mondrian wraps ROLAP, MDX, and XMLA around any relational source. 

First Test

During our phone conversation, Nick suggested a quick test. Since he had the full Pentaho suite up and running on his computer, he exposed the XMLA provider to a public HTTP port. And I on my end ran my command line XMLA test tool. The results of our little impromtu integration test can be found on Nick's blog.

http://www.bayontechnologies.com/bt/blog/archives/2006/02/this_graph_is_v.php

What I've been wanting to do is a more comprehensive test of Mondrian.  And I've finally found a moment to work on it.

Comprehensive Tests

I have a cmd file full of xmla.wsf invocations to test many kinds of Discover calls and a few Execute calls. So I had this as a ready-made compatability test. I just changed the XML/A URL and the catalog name ("FoodMart" instead of "FoodMart 2000") and ran the script.

All of my XML/A invocations except one worked against Mondrian. In a couple of Execute calls, I did have to change the query to have {} around select statements where I didn't have them - I guess Mondrian is more of a sticker for details. The call which failed was one in which I was doing a search of dimension members using an InStr() function inside MDX.

ChartSpace Tests

Nothing really to report here. All of my chart generation tests worked - for example all of the samples from the Nov. 22, 2005 article.

Summary

Having another XML/A provider to play with is cool. And having one which can wrap XMLA and MDX around pretty much any relational source, and which can run on Windows or Linux is really cool. I've set up a Debian machine for testing Mondrian on that platform and will report my findings when I have them.