OLAP Answers your Queries Fast

The ever increasing demand for various reports and analysis by the managers, executives and business analysts in order to increase business and productivity has given a prime significance to the Information Technology of any organization. In short form, the management of any organization heavily depends on IT these days with the advancement of technology. Gone are the days when managers had to rush to various departments like accounts, sales and marketing, logistics and human resource to get the reports which help them in making big decisions. These days, thanks to IT, these things have become very simple and one can get all the relevant information with different dimensions on a single click of a mouse button. Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) system has a great contribution in achieving this.

OLAP is a type of methodology, or system, which provides great assistance to the employees of an organization in retrieving any kind of data or report with ease in quick time. It is used for the following purposes:

It allows data analysis from different angles or business dimensions.

It supports the decision makers who frequently require complex data and report to make vital strategic decisions.

It uses large data source and handles complex analysis before presenting the reports in understandable format.

OLAP system includes six architectures they are – Relational OLAP, Multidimensional OLAP, Hybrid OLAP, Desktop OLAP, Web based OLAP and Real time OLAP. The first three architectures are used in almost all the OLAP systems. Multi dimensional OLAP (MOLAP) is the most common architecture which provides the required information quickly in comparison to the other types.

MOLAP architecture uses the relational databases and converts the data in structured format to create its own multi dimensional database from which the data access takes very little time. The Relational OLAP accesses the data directly from the relational databases hence it takes more time in analyzing the data. The Hybrid OLAP uses the feature of both Relational OLAP and Multi dimensional OLAP in data analysis.