The Data Warehouse Development Life Cycle
Online Analytical Processing and Oracle
Dr. E. F. (Ted) Codd coined the phrase online analytical processing
(OLAP) in a 1993 white paper called Providing OLAP (Online
Analytical Processing) to User-Analysts: An IT Mandate. Soon after
the publication of this paper, OLAP became the latest buzzword in
the database arena and every IS professional struggled to understand
OLAP and how it fit into the paradigm of decision support systems (DSS)
applications. In addition to defining OLAP, Dr. Codd also went on to
create 12 rules for OLAP which are similar in form to Codd’s 12
rules for relational databases. Given the recent popularity of OLAP,
it is very easy to view OLAP as a nascent technology. However, OLAP,
as defined by Codd, is not a new technology, and some products, such
as the IRI Express OLAP engine, have been available for more than 20
years.
As more companies embrace the concept of creating a
historical data repository for OLAP and DSS applications, new
client/server issues are emerging as developers struggle to create
Oracle-based client/server applications. This chapter reviews OLAP
with a focus on the various techniques used to interface OLAP
applications with Oracle databases.
A great deal of interest has surfaced in the
application of data warehousing and multidimensional databases for
advanced systems. Advanced systems , such as expert systems and
decision support systems have been used for decades to solve
semi-structured and even unstructured problems. Traditionally, these
types of systems combine inference engines and relational databases
in order to store the knowledge processing components, and they have
all done these tasks without the benefit of having a huge data
warehouse..
OLAP News
The explosive interest in OLAP has fueled the creation of a popular
new Internet newsgroup dedicated to OLAP issues. You can find the
newsgroup at comp.database.olap
