BISM model from the eyes of MVC / MVP design pattern

Having spent quite some time in application development world, design pattern is one thing that I cannot take out easily from my head. I was going through a post by T.K.Anand on Analysis Services Roadmap for SQL Server Denali and Beyond and a particular section gave me a glimpse of what looks like Model View Controller / Model View Presenter design pattern in .NET / application development world. Below is an excerpt from the post. I have highlighted my comments inline with these points. Before reading these points, take a look at the first BISM image shared by Microsoft.

The BI Semantic Model can be viewed as a 3-layer model:

• The Data Model layer that is exposed to client applications. Even though the BISM model is fundamentally relational, it can expose itself using both relational as well as multidimensional interfaces. OLAP-aware client applications such as Excel can consume the multidimensional interface and send MDX queries to the model. On the other hand, a free-form reporting application such as Crescent can use the relational interface and send DAX queries.

[Siddharth]: This can be seen as the view part of the MVC pattern. If I were an application developer I would call this layer as the presentation interface / facade. Crescent is providing support only to BISM models as of now. Crescent and SQL Azure Reporting are starting off on a conservative basis where they are providing support to BISM Models and SQL Azure databases only, respectively.

• The Business Logic layer that encapsulates the intelligence in the model. The business logic is created by the model author using DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) or MDX (Multidimensional Expressions). DAX is an expression language based on Excel formulas that was introduced in PowerPivot and built on relational concepts. It does not offer the power and flexibility that MDX does, but it is simpler to use and requires minimal tuning. There will always be sophisticated BI applications that need the power of MDX calculations and we envision that the BI Semantic Model will offer the choice of MDX as well, but this will likely come in a release after Denali.

[Siddharth]: This layer can be seen as the controller part of the MVC pattern. BI Semantic Model would offer the choice of MDX and would be available in future versions, means that it is definitely not a priority right now. In my views not just the sophisticated applications ones, but almost all existing applications need MDX. It would have been nice if it would have been the other way round, where MDX support is provided now with partial DAX now and rest in service packs / future release.

• The Data Access layer that integrates data from various sources – relational databases, business applications, flat files, OData feeds, etc. There are two options for data access – cached and realtime. The cached mode pulls in data from all the sources and stores in the VertiPaq in-memory column store. VertiPaq is a breakthrough technology that encapsulates state-of-art data compression algorithms along with a sophisticated multi-threaded query processor that is optimized for the latest multi-core chipsets, thereby delivering blazing fast performance with no need for indexing, aggregates or tuning. The realtime mode, on the other hand, is a completely passthrough mode that pushes the query processing and business logic evaluation down to the data source, thereby exploiting the capabilities of the source system and avoiding the need to copy the data into the VertiPaq store. Obviously there is a tradeoff between these two modes (the high performance of VertiPaq versus the latency and overhead associated with copying the data into VertiPaq) and that choice is left to the model author.

[Siddharth]: This layer can be seen as the model part of MVC pattern. If I am getting this right, this means MOLAP evoparates here. No doubt Vertipaq is the demand of time, but legacy applications cannot make an entry into this layer, or source data from their data marts to this layer and adopt this model.

In my views, neither Microsoft nor Developer community can decide what industry has to adopt. Only customer needs and market standpoint of BISM in comparison to it's competition can decide the success of BISM as the probable successor of it's predecessor.