OLAP CUBE

hello,

sorry for the late post.

I would like to talk about OLAP Cube.

An OLAP cube is a set of data, organized in a way that facilitates non-predetermined queries for aggregated information, or in other words,online analytical processing. OLAP is one of the computer-based techniques for analyzing business data that are collectively called business intelligence

OLAP tools enable users to interactively analyze multidimensional data from multiple perspectives. OLAP consists of three basic analytical operations: consolidation, drill-down, and slicing and dicing. Consolidation involves the aggregation of data that can be accumulated and computed in one or more dimensions. For example, all sales offices are rolled up to the sales department or sales division to anticipate sales trends. In contrast, the drill-down is a technique that allows users to navigate through the details. For instance, users can access to the sales by individual products that make up a region’s sales. Slicing and dicing is a feature whereby users can take out (slicing) a specific set of data of the cube and view (dicing) the slices from different viewpoints.

The analyst can understand the meaning contained in the databases using multi-dimensional analysis. By aligning the data content with the analyst's mental model, the chances of confusion and erroneous interpretations are reduced. The analyst can navigate through the database and screen for a particular subset of the data, changing the data's orientations and defining analytical calculations. The user-initiated process of navigating by calling for page displays interactively, through the specification of slices via rotations and drill down/up is sometimes called "slice and dice". Common operations include slice and dice, drill down, roll up, and pivot.

Slice: A slice is a subset of a multi-dimensional array corresponding to a single value for one or more members of the dimensions not in the subuser.

Dice: The dice operation is a slice on more than two dimensions of a data cube (or more than two consecutive slices)

Drill Down/Up: Drilling down or up is a specific analytical technique whereby the user navigates among levels of data ranging from the most summarized (up) to the most detailed (down)

Roll-up: A roll-up involves computing all of the data relationships for one or more dimensions. To do this, a computational relationship or formula might be defined.

Pivot: This operation is also called rotate operation. It rotates the data in order to provide an alternative presentation of data - the report or page display takes a different dimensional orientation.

link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLAP_cube

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_analytical_processing