[Haskell-cafe] Haskell used for data analysis - OLAP?

Edward Kmett ekmett at gmail.com
Sun Jul 12 08:49:50 EDT 2009


2009/7/9 Günther Schmidt <gue.schmidt at web.de>

> Hi,
>
> I've developed this commercial app in Haskell with all of the business
> logic coded in SQL with the help of haskelldb. Some of the intermediate
> results (of queries) I had to manifest in extra tables because the initial
> query was expensive, the intermediate result would be the "source" data of
> other queries and queries can't themselves be indexed for further efficient
> querying. Since the amount of data could become rather large, in-memory
> processing wasn't an option and I thus chose SQL (Sqlite).
>
> The solution works, but still I'm not quite happy about it, since I
> consider the tables that hold intermediate results fixes.
>
> I understand that the financial industry employs Haskell to analyse large
> data set under complex schemes. I wonder what techniques are employed for
> that, do they use Haskell to create some sort of OLAPish tools? Do they use
> Haskell to run complex queries against SQL data warehouses?
>
> Günther
>

A couple of years back when I was forced to learn MDX in excruciating
detail, I wound up building a little Haskell DSL for manipulating small
OLAP-like datasets; I never really liked the API though, and the embedding
was pretty weak, because there wasn't much middle ground between getting
almost no type protection and having to keep a bunch of HLists around to
make sure you don't reuse a dimension attribute in a query incorrectly.

As for interfacing with 3rd party OLAP cubes, I haven't heard of anyone
having been masochistic enough to build an interface to something like ADO
MD from Haskell.

-Edward Kmett
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