The Medical Center has purchased Hyperion's Pillar software to prepare departmental budgets. I may be asked to programmatically write data to, or retrieve from either the local or remote data (with VFP6).

The local data comes in a "cube" which sounds like a way to present something like telephone expenses across all subdivisions, over all months. I think this will look like Excel to the users.

The remote data sounds like an ODBC SQL database, probably Oracle for us. OLAP sounds a little like COM, which I have no experience with.

I do know how to read and write to Excel spreadsheets, and how to read and write to SQL databases.

Does anyone have any experience with any of this? I'm afraid that the local programming support for these databases hasn't been trained yet, and the Hyperion people (if I had access to them) wouldn't know enough about Fox to help me bridge my knowledge gap.