One of the most common reasons for wanting to access a MultiValue system from other platforms is the need to allow business analysts, financial and executive staff to access this data from modern, familiar, popular BI tools.  Probably the front runner in this set is Microsoft Excel, with commercial BI suites from major vendors taking second place.

This is such a big topic that I’m going to have to break it into two sections.  After lots of discussion, I’ve decided to pick the following point to split the two parts on, and that point would be the question of whether to report against the live data or to use a data warehouse or data mart approach.