What is Ravel?

One control, five OLAP operations

Ravel lets you perform the usual OLAP operations — rollup (reduction), drill down (the inverse of rollup), slicing, dicing and pivoting — through simple manipulations of the Ravel control itself. No pivot table configuration, no formulas: you grab the data and move it.

This is a live Ravel control, not a screenshot — try it. Click on the axis marked “Country” and drag it over the “Gender” axis. The axes switch positions, and the output spreadsheet or plot automatically updates to show country by year instead of gender by year — a rotation of the 3D datacube. Drag the highlighted slice from “Australia” to “Female” and you’ve changed which slice of the datacube you’re viewing. Grab the gender axis and slide it toward the origin to aggregate sales over both genders; slide it back out and the axis expands so you can examine individual data items again. That’s pivot, slice, roll-up and drill down — the basic operations of OLAP — plus some forms of dicing via the filter caliper and pick-slice concepts.

Try it on real data

Ravel ships as part of the Ravel application, built on the open source Minsky systems dynamics simulator. See the same control running on real data in the model library, or read more about the product.

Licensing Ravel

Ravel is written in C++. If you’re interested in a source code license for use in your own products, contact us to start a discussion.

Ravel is copyright Ravelation Pty Ltd, and the concept is protected by patent.