Architecture
The core of the Holos Server was a Business Intelligence (BI) virtual machine. The Holos Language (HL) was compiled into a soft instruction code, and executed in this virtual machine (similar in concept to Java in more modern systems). The virtual machine was fully fault-tolerant, using structured exception handling internally, and provided a debugger interface. The debugger was machine-level until quite late on, after which it also supported source-level access.
OLAP data was handled as a core data type of HL, with specific syntax to accommodate multidimensional data concepts, and complete programmatic freedom to explore and utilise the data. This made it very different from the industry trend of query-based OLAP and SQL engines. On the upside, it allowed amazing flexibility in the applications to which it could be applied. On the downside, it mean that 3-tier configurations were never successfully implemented since the processing had to be close to the data itself. This hindered large-scale deployment to many clients, and the use of OLAP data from other vendors. In reality, its own data access times were probably some of the fastest around—at the individual cell level; they had to be in order to be practical. However, when fetching back bulk data for non-cooperating clients, or data from other vendors, the queries could not be optimised as a whole. Its own data access used a machine-wide shared memory cache.
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