Questions On Online Analytical Processing - 1226 Words

CHAPTER 3 On-Line Analytical Processing Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) applications and tools are those that are designed to ask â€Å"complex queries of large multidimensional collections of data.† OLAP is used for data mining, as well as the discovery of undiscerned relationship between data items. Since not all transactional data is needed for trend analysis, the OLAP database doesn’t have to be as large as a data warehouse. With the use of Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), data can be imported from existing relational databases to create a multidimensional database for OLAP. The Need for OLAP: What drives the OLAP system is the multidimensional nature of the business problem. These problems are characterized by retrieving a very†¦show more content†¦The OLAP Guidelines: Dr. E.F. Codd the â€Å"father† of the relational database model, created a list of rules or yardstick needed to measure any set of OLAP systems. Users should priorities these rules according to their needs to match their business requirements. These rules are: 1) Multidimensional Conceptual View: The OLAP system should provide an appropriate multidimensional data model that matches the business problems as well as its requirements. 2) Transparency: The OLAP tool should be transparent to users. These transparency helps to improve efficiency and productivity of users by providing them with the front-end tools that are familiar to them. 3) Accessibility: The OLAP tool should only provide access to data needed to perform a specific analysis. 4) Consistent Reporting Performance: Its important to ensure that users doesn’t experience any form of degradation in performance due to increase in the size of database. 5) Client/server Architecture: The OLAP system should use the client server architecture to ensure optimum performance, flexibility, adaptability and interoperability. 6) Generic Dimensionality: The OLAP tool should ensure that the data dimensions entering should be equivalent to both the structure and operation capabilities. 7) Dynamic Sparse Matrix Handling: The OLAP too should be able to manage the sparse matrix that is, the system should be able to deduce the distribution of data and adjust the storage so as to achieve and