I'm new to the concept of cubes and OLAP. Our company has been using TM1 for a few years, although so far I've never used it. They think we can develop database applications from scratch using TM1 in place of the more traditional development tools like Visual Studio/SQL Server. Can an OLAP like TM1 be used to design a database app from the ground up? My understanding is that TM1 is more for enhancing an existing application, not building a new one. To me it appears to be a sophisticated reporting tool but I've seen some sample "programs" developed in TM1 and I'm not impressed. The user interface was just free form excel worksheets. It seemed like lots of manual processing was involved and I didn't see any way to validate the data the users were entering. For example what if you wanted the user to choose from a drop down list and not just type in something? Am I just old school?