"poco" (Spanish & Italian for "little") OLAP provides a web-based, crosstab reporting tool for your datawarehouse.  While it's not an OLAP server or full fledged data mining solution, pocOLAP makes your data easy to use and understand ... for free!

This is the readme file for pocOLAP, last updated for version 0.1.3.  For more information or updated software, please visit http://pocolap.sourceforge.net

To install pocOLAP, see the INSTALL.txt file.  For information on using pocOLAP with your own data, take a look at the "config_file_how_to.pdf" file.  For additional information, see the userdocs/ directory in CVS.  If you find that the documentation for pocOLAP is incomplete, please contact the development team, or volunteer to help us out by writing and donating documentation to the project!

For the impatient, here's how to deploy pocOLAP in Tomcat:  
	1) Unzip the pocolap.xxx.zip file
	2) Place the pocolap.war file in $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps
	3) Place the pocolapDB directory and it's contents in either /tmp (for *nix including Mac) or C:/ (for windows)
	4a) For *nix systems (assuming Tomcat is the name of the account running your server), run "chown -R tomcat /tmp/pocolapDB"
	4b) For winxp systems, change the "Read Only" attribute on the pocolapDB directory (it must not be read-only)
	5) Navigate to http://localhost:8080/pocolap/ReptPage.jsp

pocOLAP currently consists of an online crosstab/spreadsheet generator.  Best used with a star schema, users can access data through their web browser.  Data navigation is intuitive and provides the ability to drilldown for additional detail.

Version 0.1.0 introduced a new GUI which improves the user experience over older versions.  We are continuing to improve and add features to the user interface.  If there are changes you would like to see, especially as they relate to the user experience, please let us know so that we can prioritize future development.  Also, the TODO document explains items that are already slated for improvement, though there may be other items the development team is considering.

pocOLAP is sponsored by the employer of one of the developers, where the application is used in a production environment, using real-time data.  While this is not the initial intent of the project, pocOLAP has proven an extremly cost effective way of increasing productivity and has dratically improved data analysis capabilities.

The goal is to make pocOLAP suitable for production in small to medium companies on intranets, either with medium amounts of data, or moderate amounts of traffic.  It should be simple to set up, enjoyable for users, but difficult for managers and accountants to raise objections.  pocOLAP is not intended to provide real-time data analysis, scale for thousands of users, or provide advanced OLAP functionality (though these will certainly be incorporated should we find ways to do it while maintaining the other goals).

While the current version consists of a single tool which needs a considerable amount of additional development, there is nothing to prevent other tools from being included in the pocOLAP project.  If a "suite" approach is eventually realized, it may include non-reporting tools as well (for example, ETL tools).

This product includes Hypersonic SQL.  pocOLAP is distributed as open source software under the MIT license.  Please see the LICENSE file, or the source code.