I guess I have a wildly different interpretation of typical OLAP scenarios. To me this acronym mostly means "reporting". And in 99% of cases where the business desires a new report, the ideal views or type systems have not been anticipated. In these cases (most of them), I can't imagine a faster way to give the business an answer than just writing some sql.
In my experience these one off reports are very brittle. The app ends up making schema changes that are breaking to these one off reports, and you usually don’t find out until it goes to production.
I’ve dealt with the maintenance nightmare before. At current gig we’re exploring solutions, curious what a robust pipeline looks like in 2025.
The ORM piece is interesting — we use ActiveRecord and Ruby, and accidentally breaking schema changes within app will get caught by the unit test suite. I would love for a way to bring OLAP reports in similarly to test at CI time.
Surely there is a way to run a raw query in Rails/ActiveRecord and use it in a smoke test?