Business Intelligence:Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

Vineet AroraAnirudh Sharma

Priyanka Srivastava

Business Intelligence: Definition

• OLAP (online analytical processing) is computer processing that enables a user to easily and selectively extract and view data from different points of view

• OLAP can be used for data mining or the discovery of previously undiscerned relationships between data items.

• An OLAP database does not need to be as large as a data warehouse, since not all transactional data is needed for trend analysis.

• Two leading OLAP products are Hyperion Solution's Essbase and Oracle's Express Server.

OLAP: Online Analytical Processing

OLAP permit users to view data at any desired level of granularity.•Consolidation (roll-up): It is moving from finer-granularity data to coarser granularity i.e. aggregation of data.•Drill-down: Drill- Down is opposite of Roll-Up. It display detail data that compromise consolidated data.•Slicing and dicing: Slicing is selecting one dimensional view whereas dicing is selecting multidimensional view.

OLAP: Three Analytical Operations

OLAP: Three Analytical Operations(Contd.)

Question To Think About!