Online analytical processing, or OLAP, is an approach to answer multi-dimensional analytical queries swiftly in computing.
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18 Facts About OLAP
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OLAP is part of the broader category of business intelligence, which encompasses relational databases, report writing and data mining.
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Typical applications of OLAP include business reporting for sales, marketing, management reporting, business process management, budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting and similar areas, with new applications emerging, such as agriculture.
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4.
Term OLAP was created as a slight modification of the traditional database term online transaction processing.
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OLAP is typically contrasted to OLTP, which is generally characterized by much less complex queries, in a larger volume, to process transactions rather than for the purpose of business intelligence or reporting.
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Whereas OLAP systems are mostly optimized for read, OLTP has to process all kinds of queries.
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The usual interface to manipulate an OLAP cube is a matrix interface, like Pivot tables in a spreadsheet program, which performs projection operations along the dimensions, such as aggregation or averaging.
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The most important mechanism in OLAP which allows it to achieve such performance is the use of aggregations.
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OLAP systems have been traditionally categorized using the following taxonomy.
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Some MOLAP tools require the pre-computation and storage of derived data, such as consolidations – the operation known as processing.
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11.
Examples of commercial products that use MOLAP are Cognos Powerplay, Oracle Database OLAP Option, MicroStrategy, Microsoft Analysis Services, Essbase, TM1, Jedox, and icCube.
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ROLAP tools do not use pre-calculated data cubes but instead pose the query to the standard relational database and its tables in order to bring back the data required to answer the question.
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ROLAP has the ability to drill down to the lowest level of detail in the database.
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Therefore, ROLAP still involves creating an additional copy of the data.
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The superior flexibility of ROLAP tools allows this less than optimal design to work, but performance suffers.
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OLAP had released its own OLAP product, Essbase, a year earlier.
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The OLAP market experienced strong growth in the late 1990s with dozens of commercial products going into market.
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