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OLAP Cubes

Dear Expert :

Hai,
I am Victor Lee from Asia.
Currently doing CPA program.

I read about you from the net.

So, I think you can help me for the question below :

Recently, I come across the term " OLAP Cubes " from Australia CPA
magazine,
it is said to be an exciting technological tool.
I am very interested in it ,

Can you explain more about it ?

What is OLAP Cubes ? is it a program ? where can I download it ? does it
run on DOS/ Windows ?

Thanks a lot expert,

Hope to hear from you soon,

Victor Lee,
ASA 9243440

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Guy Hengel [angelIII / a3]

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thedrs

OLAP is another way to manage your database's data.
instead of managing tables like in RDBMS, you manage cubes.

Relational DBs such as MSSQL, maintain data in tables - their strong featue is that they let you do FAST INSERT operations - but when you want to do queries on a very large DB they tend to be very slow.

OLAP tells you, choose what tables and structures are important for your queries - then it organizes your data in a cube with dimensions and then you do a cube processing operations which precalculates all the data on the cube, then any queries done on the cube are FAST because all the data has been calculated.

Microsoft has an OLAP tool called Analysis Services and you can find it on the MS SQL Server CDs (just run the installation and you will see an option to install it on the first screen). in Analysis services you will find a good tutorial with pictures about OLAP and how it is used.

There are a few OLAP tools out there except Microsoft, Oracle has "Oracle Express", there is hyperion and if you want to do the same queries that you did before and not leave the RDBMS world you can use solutions like HyperRoll (www.hyperroll.com).

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