olap cubes 101 introduction and terminology

OLAP Cubes 101

Introduction and Terminology

Presenter: Steve LittleProduct Manager

Questions? [email protected]

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In the next 15 minutes we’re going to cover-

Secret Session: OLAP Cubes 101 – Introduction and Terminology

OLAPOnline Analytical Processing

OLAP = Cubes

• What are cubes?

• What are cubes good for?

• Cube terminology

• Three myths about Cubes



What are Cubes?Let’s start by stating what cubes are NOT…

Cubes are not relational databases…(Microsoft Dynamics NAV, AX and GP are all examples of relational databases)

• Relational databases are optimized to get information into the system



Getting information out of a relational database can be challenging

“How much profit did we make selling Sno-cones to Icelanders last year?”

In a Relational Database the information you need to answer this question is scattered across many tables

• Customer• Country/Region• Item• Sales Invoice Line• Sales Invoice Header• Sales Credit Memo Line• Sales Credit Memo Header

Getting this information out of a relational database is slow and difficult.

What you want is easy and fast



There’s another less obvious problem…Once you get your answer to a question like this, it spurs other questions

• Who were these customers?

• Are our sales growing or shrinking?

Cubes make it easy to answer questions like theseby reorganizing a copy of the data so that it’s easy and fast to get information out.

• Did sales fluctuate month over month?

• Who was our top salesperson?• And could we put her to better use?



Cubes are a multi-dimensional way of organizing dataCubes enable near instantaneous analysis of large amounts of data

2012

2013

2011Chocolate

SnoCones

Taffy

U.S

.

Cana

da

Icel

and

Sales $10,000Profit $3,000Profit Pct 30%

Customer (Country)

Products

Cube with three dimensions



Cube TerminologyDimensions and Measures

2012

2013

2011Chocolate

SnoCones

Taffy

U.S

.

Cana

da

Icel

and

Sales $10,000Profit $3,000Profit Pct 30%

Customer (Country)

Products

Cube with three dimensions

Dimension A category that can be used to slice the data

Measure A calculated numerical valuee.g. sums, counts, averages, percentages

Many measures are pre-calculated in a cube – providing extremely fast performance


Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

2011

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Han

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and

Ice

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Icy

Hot

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Reyk

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Selfo

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Icel

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Cust

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Month Quarter Year

Cube TerminologyLevels & Hierarchies

Hierarchy- A way to organize different levels of a dimension(usually largest to smallest)

Level-A grouping within a dimension

City

Coun

try

Demonstration of the user interface within Excel


Three Myths about Cubes

• Cubes require months of planning and implementation before users can get value out of them

• Cube are a luxury, applicable only to large companies with BI development teams and large budgets

• Customizing Cubes is slow and difficult

- Jet Enterprise is typically installed and running in two hours or less for NAV and GP customers

- Jet Enterprise includes a Data Warehouse Automation tool which makes it easy to customize cubes in a drag-and-drop interface

- This is no longer true. Jet Reports has more than 600 clients running our cubes, ranging from large multi-national corporations to small non-profits


Thank you for your participation!

Presenter: Steve Little

[email protected]

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olap cubes 101 introduction and terminology

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