Open Source Pivot table (OLAP cube?)

[Laszlo Nagy]

> Please note: this is not a direct answer to your question.
>
> I would personally go for a client-server model; not worrying what the
> server is written in or how it works. For some reason I have a scary
> thought of your widget pulling in 100million records and cross-tabbing
> two dimensions :) Don't worry about python bindings or such, why not
> try and find something that can take an OLAP query, maintain
> aggregates/computations on a DB that can possibly return in XML/JSON/
> WHATEVER then just have your widget render visually the response and
> send out XML/JSON/WHATEVER on click events.
>   
Regarding the implementation, I was already thinking about separation of 
the data query and the rendering part. Your answer was particularly 
useful, because I was not thinking about MDX and a real client server 
model. Until now. :-)

Can you tell something about the licence of the MDX language? Can I just 
make a new engine/library that uses MDX? Or do I need to develop a new 
query language in order to make it open source?

It seems strange that several open source RDBMS exist (sqlite, 
postgresql, mysql) but none of them support multi dimensional queries. 
Is this a very difficult thing to implement? Even if we could only have 
a not-so-efficient implementation that works with smaller datasets (100 
000 records or so), it would be nice to have it.

Thanks

   Laszlo