What is OLAP?
One of the effects of business growth is a mountain of data that has to be manufactured, stored, tracked, and interpreted. A growing business needs sophisticated methods of data processing. One of the ways that businesses do this is to use OLAP. OLAP stands for On Line Analytical Processing, a series of protocols used mainly for business reporting. Using OLAP, businesses can analyze data in all manner of different ways, including budgeting, planning, simulation, data warehouse reporting, and trend analysis. A main component of OLAP is its ability to make multidimensional calculations, allowing a wide and lightning-fast array of possibilities. In addition, the bigger the business, the bigger its business reporting needs. Multidimensional calculations enable a large business to complete in seconds what it otherwise would have waited a handful of minutes to receive. One main benefit of OLAP is consistency of calculations. No matter how fast data is processed through OLAP software or serve
During the last ten years, a significant percentage of corporate data has migrated to relational databases. Relational databases have been used heavily in the areas of operations and control, with a particular emphasis on transaction processing (for example, manufacturing process control, brokerage trading). To be successful in this arena, relational database vendors place a premium on the highly efficient execution of a large number of small transactions and near fault tolerant availability of data. More recently, relational database vendors have also sold their databases as tools for building Data Warehouses. A Data Warehouse stores tactical information that answers “who?” and “what?” questions about past events. A typical query submitted to a Data Warehouse is: “What was the total revenue for the eastern region in the third quarter?” It is important to distinguish the capabilities of a Data Warehouse from those of an OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) system. In contrast to a Data
OLAP is an acronym for On Line Analytical Processing. OLAP performs multidimensional analysis of business data and provides the capability for complex calculations, trend analysis, and sophisticated data modeling. It is quickly becoming the fundamental foundation for Intelligent Solutions including Business Performance Management, Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting, Financial Reporting, Analysis, Simulation Models, Knowledge Discovery, and Data Warehouse Reporting. OLAP enables end-users to perform ad hoc analysis of data in multiple dimensions, thereby providing the insight and understanding they need for better decision making.
A growing business of a company brings lots of effects with it and huge amount of data that needs to be stored and tracked is one of them. So, in order to deal with this data, new and sophisticated methods of data processing are required and OLAP or as others say, “On Line Analytical Processing”, is one of them.
