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by TeMPOraL 2252 days ago
I've been looking into this space a bit (after one day realizing that what I'm doing at work is essentially reinventing OLAP abstractions). The way I see it, multidimensional spreadsheeting has evolved into expensive, proprietary ERP and BI software, while the ideas from it end up being repeatedly reinvented in various "excel killer"/"more complicated CRUD" startups without ever reaching their full potential (I'm guessing that would kill the business value). The middle doesn't seem to exist (EDIT or maybe it does?[1]) - I don't know of any actual multidimensional spreadsheet that's accessible to regular people.

There was Egeria[0] featured on HN some years ago, but they've seem to have reverted to a closed beta since then.

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[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18656746

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22927875 points out https://www.xcubes.net/, which seems like the "middle" I was looking for.

1 comments

The multidimensional spreadsheet is a more complex piece of software than the 2-D, and invites more data that needs to be managed and processed. So it trends to a more database-like system. There might be a niche for small and even-more-complex modeling. It’s hard to open-source something that takes the required investment.