OLAP and pivot tables

[Duncan Smith]

George Sakkis wrote:
> After a brief search, I didn't find any python package related to OLAP
> and pivot tables. Did I miss anything ? To be more precise, I'm not so
> interested in a full-blown OLAP server with an RDBMS backend, but
> rather a pythonic API for constructing datacubes in memory, slicing and
> dicing them, drilling down or up dimensions and exposing them in some
> suitable form to a presentation layer. I've hacked a first cut of a
> pivot table implementation and an XHTML generator that produces
> hierarchical html tables but it's not particularly general or easily
> extensible so far. Is there any interest at all on a pythonic version
> of something like JOLAP or XMLA ?
> 
> George
> 

I have a few applications that require the generation of large numbers
of contingency tables from a higher-dimensional base table.  The
approaches I've tried (Numeric arrays / dictionary-based sparse arrays /
various caching schemes / searches on subset lattices for previously
generated 'super'-tables that can be marginalised from etc.) still
represent major bottlenecks.  So, I guess I would be interested.

Duncan