I just got another idea about why ADO.NET keeps local copies of remote tables. With those tables in memory, and using OO code instead of SQL, it might be a little easier to write a JavaScript-based (or C#-based) OLAP client that performs queries on the dataset. Having been a perpetual OLAP noob for, like, forever, it never occurred to me, but, I was fooling around with Excel pivot tables and had that “aha” moment.
This is going to be tough on PHP, because it doesn’t really have a good persistent runtime implementation. You can’t really do something like allocate a 500k variable in the $_SESSION array. For PHP to compete, it’s going to need an in-memory object store that maps to PHP objects. Heck, they’ll also need olap services for mysql. So, maybe it won’t happen for PHP… but then, maybe it won’t happen for olap for average people for a while, either. (Check out Integrated Data Mining and OLAP for MySQL)
Tomorrow: relaxation tapes to chill out and not freak out so much. Day after: probably hit the code and finish up the failsave OLE client.