OLAP stands for "On-line Analytical Processing". It has also been referred to as Multi-Dimensional reporting or simply "Cubes". This all means that you give user's the ability to analyze numeric data (financials, statistics, etc.) in a format that allows them to interactively "slice and dice" the data and apply aggregate functions any way they want. You can show Text in your row/column headers, but the information in the data/grid portion must be numeric and us usually aggregated using a function such as Sum(), Avg(), etc.

An Excel "Pivot Table" is the most basic way to do this. A little higher up are tools like DynamiCube. Further up are tools like Seagate Analysis. Then at the top are the big financial tools and data warehouses.

I like dynamicube because it fits in the middle. As long as I can get an ADO recordsource, it can manipulate the data. It also can be dropped on my form as an ActiveX control and appears to be part of my application rather than an external feed.

Microsoft says that they have extended ADO with new objects, collections, and methods that are designed to take advantage of OLE-DB for OLAP. These extensions are collectively known as ADO-MD. Take a look at:
http://www.microsoft.com/data/oledb/olap/default.htm

The new version of DynamiCube is called ActiveCube and only works with OLAP and ADO-MD datasources. I don't know if there is an ADO-MD driver for Visual Foxpro. I will try to find out more. When I do, I will get back to you.

I'm sure this answers some questions and opens up many others. There is little documentation on ADO-MD and ActiveCube is definately setup to work easily with SQL Server, Oracle, etc. But, maybe I just need to dig deeper.

Thanks,
Paul