>>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).
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>>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.
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>>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.
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>>I do know how to read and write to Excel spreadsheets, and how to read and write to SQL databases.
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>>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.
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>I know nothing about Pillar, but a cube is a multi-dimensional table. SQL Server 7.0 can create cubes through it's OLAP services. You get at a cube in SQL Server through it's OLE-DB provider. So, if Pillar has something like an ODBC driver or OLE-DB provider, you shouldn't have any problems.

Thanks Craig. I'll look through all of my books and articles and re-read about OLE-DB. Maybe it will make sense after awhile. Then if I talk to any of the Pillar people I may sound intelligent. (Ha!)

Climbing the learning curve daily....