I have a simple Windows application entirely based on these Microsoft technologies:
- Office Web Components (OWC) as front-end
- OLEDB Provider for OLAP Services as back-end
The OLEDB Provider reads data from several ODBC sources and builds a cube file while the client simply shows OWC ActiveX connected to this generated cube file. The user can use dimensions and measures from the cube file and create graphs or pivot tables, filter data, drill-down, use some MDX syntax... everything that OWC supports.
My customer loves the simplicity of the GUI of OWC. There is terrible limitation within (64K rows in dimension), but worse is that Microsoft completely abandoned OWC development. It looks like there isn't any natural successor of OWC. I guess there is a solution with Excel as a front-end and MSSQL Server as a back-end.
My priorities are:
- same or similar GUI as OWC (Excel fits)
- "cube in a transportable file" concept (?)
What technologies should I use now?