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The Client

Kantar Worldpanel is the world leader in consumer knowledge and insights based on continuous consumer panels. Running for over 60 years, their services cover 60 countries directly or through partners, delivering market monitoring, advanced analytics and tailored market research solutions in fields as diverse as FMCG, impulse products, fashion, baby, telecommunications and entertainment. Kantar Worldpanel is part of the Kantar Group, a division of WPP.

The Challenge

Kantar Worldpanel were looking to address scalability and supportability issues within their OLAP layer. They needed a solution that was able to dynamically produce OLAP databases at scale while supporting all the existing (Microsoft based) MDX queries powering thousands of dashboard designs. The solution required would need to scale across multiple servers and multiple instances of icCube. They needed a proof of concept that would replay a full load test across a broad sample of complex MDX queries.

The Solution

The proof of concept demonstrated that a particular icCube implementation was able to cope more than satisfactorily with both the load of dynamic production of OLAP cubes and the subsequent queries. The icCube OLAP solution was implemented to clients in May 2014, and has been running successfully and without a single bug since.