| Previous | Table of Contents | Next |
The OLAP Council’s Multidimensional API (MDAPI) is a non-proprietary specification for an object-oriented API that exposes
a full range of OLAP functions that a given vendor’s implementation of an OLAP product might want to support. This includes:
Server connection and login, Metadata querying functions, multidimensional data querying functions, generic filtering and
sorting capabilities, and error handling and progress monitoring functions. Vendors implementing the MDAPI may also add their
own extensions wherever necessary, through pass-through capabilities inherent in the MDAPI.
The MDAPI provides a query-oriented interface to an OLAP metadata/data provider (such as an OLAP server) that can be used
to expose both metadata and data cell contents of the provider, and supports the incremental modification of queries, as well
as the navigation of result sets and extraction of values from result sets.