Free Business Intelligence Practice Tests - Online Analytical Processing
OLAP (online Analytical Processing) is the computer processing by which a user can drills down the information easily or can extract information and analyze it from different point of views. For this, OLAP system store data in multidimensional database which reduce the overhead of analyzing the data. The relational databases may be considered as two-dimensional database but a multidimensional database contains every attribute about the data like (manufacturing date, sales date, geographical area of sale, time period etc.)
For example, a user of motorbike industry may ask for spreadsheets of all the motorbike production companies and compare their sales, production (in units), revenue etc. and may plan strategies based on these analysis. The OLAP system can be used as intersection of dimensions like Sales of X product in Asian Region during Y month or Sales of X product in American Region during Y month for comparison. One can drill down the OLAP information as much as they require for their analysis, like time period can be divided into weeks, days or may be in hours, or the region can be divided to a particular country, state or city etc.
OLAP is considered as a Data Mining technology. It can be used to discover the unexplored region of data and its relationship with other data objects.
