What's an OLAP Tool?


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  Step 1:  The Concept

Open a Report
OLAP stands for On-line Analytical Processing. It is a type of reporting tool that provides users with the capability to do efficient "drill" or "trend" analysis on large volumes of atomic or summarized data stored in a multi-dimensional model (either star or snow-flake schema) or a relational model. Depending on the underlying database technology (relational or multi-dimensional), the tools are referred to as ROLAP (Relational OLAP) or MOLAP (Multi-dimensional OLAP).
  Step 2:  Drill Analysis

Open a Report
Data may have a hierarchical relationship such as year, month, and day. OLAP tools provide users the ability to analyze FACT variations at different levels of hierarchy. There are different types of drill analysis such as drill-down (using lower level attribute), drill-up (using higher level attribute), drill-within (using attribute from same dimension not in main hierarchy), drill-anywhere (using attributes from any dimension), and drill-across (using attributes from other dimensions).
  Step 3:  Trend Analysis

Data warehouses or data mart(s) contain historical data. OLAP tools provide users the ability to analyze FACT trends for different business perspectives (dimensions), having different levels of hierarchy, over a given time duration.
  Step 4:  Rotation Analysis

OLAP tools may present data in simple tabular reports (along X-axis and Y-axis) such as year 2000 sales (in dollars) (intersection of X-axis and Y-axis) of sales person(s) (listed along Y-axis) for 12 months (listed along X-axis). OLAP tools provide users the ability to perform rotation analysis (referred as slicing and dicing) of tabular data by interchanging data between X-axis and Y-axis such as year 2000 sales (in dollars) of sales person(s) (listed along X-axis) for 12 months (listed along Y-axis).