For my money, there's no better multidimensional database I've used for operational analytics than SSAS. JasperSoft, Pentaho, Essbase, Cognos, etc all just don't cut it. Essbase if you're doing GL (SSAS doesn't aggregate Parent-Child very well), but SSAS is an incredibly powerful tool. You can use Postgres with it, so you don't need SQL Server RDBMS to go with it, and you can just pay the license for your SSAS server (which needs more memory than CPU, anyway).