Creating a Cube using pure OLAP DML

Question

This should be quite simple, but neither reading OLAP_*.pdf nor googling helped me, so maybe you can give me a hint where to look:
I want to create dimensions, populate them, create a cube, and finally populate it, using just OLAP DML (i.e. no DBMS_AW or CWM/CWM2 packages).
1) How can I execute OLAP DML? Right now I'm using sqlplus, wrapping each line in execute dbms_aw.execute(...);
There's some better way, right? :)
2) Can someone give me a link to a simple tutorial, showing how to create a cube et c.? Right now I'm as far as
AW CREATE olaptest1
DEFINE dimfoo DIMENSION TEXT AW olaptest1
DEFINE dimbar DIMENSION TEXT AW olaptest1
SQL SELECT DISTINCT(foo) FROM footable ORDER BY 1 INTO :dimfoo
(the latter one fails, telling me that "quux is not a vaild olaptest1!dimfoo")
3) Have I understood this correctly: I only need an Catalog if I want to work with AWM or DBMS_AWM, not if I just use DML?

Answer 1

I'm not sure exactly why you want to do this.
I guess I didn't explain very clearly :)
We (i.e. the company I work for) creates software (in C++) which needs to work with a lot of data which is in an Oracle-DB.
As the analysis done by the SW would profit (performance-wise) from the layout of the data in an cube, we want to get the data in a cube.
But information like the number of dimensions isn't known beforehand (as that's sth. that's dependent on the site the customer uses the SW on, and can
change with time), the software has to do the creation of dims and the cube itself.
(For the curious ones: http://www.centerpoint.eu.com/ )
And as OLAPI isn't available for C++ (at least afaics), I'd really want to do this in PL/SQL.
If you do use standard form, you then allow yourself the
option of using the various tools later
That's really not needed :)
You can always build the original AW using
AWM, then save the build script it generates, and use
that to do subsequent builds.
Is that build-script in OLAP DML? How do I save it?
BTW, in addition to the SPL INFILE command, there is
the DBMS_AW.INFILE plsql routine, which saves you
some quotes :-).
dbms_aw.execute('infile ''work_dir/my.inf''') vs
dbms_aw.infile('work_dir/my.inf')
I hate superfluous quotes :)
Thanks Jim!