OLAP or online analytical processing tools enable users to swiftly and interactively analyze multidimensional data from multi-dimensional analytical queries MDA. Applications of OLAPare extensively found in business reporting, sales and market reporting, management reporting, business process management, budgeting and forecasting, share and capital market, financial reporting, agriculture, etc. It’s a variation of relational database model that uses multidimensional structures to organize and express the relationships between data.
OLAP Business tools use these databases because of their ability to deliver answers to complex business queries instantly. OLAP produces results faster than any other multi-tier relational database. The mechanism in OLAP which allows it to achieve such performance is the use of aggregations or views. These views are built from the fact table by changing the granularity on specific dimensions and aggregating up data along these dimensions. Often only a predetermined number of aggregations are fully calculated; the remainders are solved on demand. The problem of deciding which aggregations to calculate is known as the view selection problem. The objective of view selection is typically to minimize the average time to answer OLAP queries. Data and reports can be viewed from various angles, which give a broader perspective. The first product that performed OLAP queries was Express, which was released in 1970 and acquired by Oracle. However the name OLAPwas coined by Edgar F. Codd, who is described as the father of the relational database.TopOLAP vendors are SAP AG, Oracle, Microsoft Corp., IBM, MicroStrategy, Infor, etc.
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