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How To Boost Productivity Using OLAP Tools

Article Description:
====================

You might have heard about OLAP, but did you know why it could be
so important for anyone who wants to know more about any data
stored in a database or warehouse? This article shows why
OLAP-tools are widely used by people of any profession, and why
it is so important to have well-represented visual information
instead of raw data to take reasonable and important decisions.


Additional Article Information:
===============================

1156 Words; formatted to 65 Characters per Line
Distribution Date and Time: 2007-07-20 13:48:00

Written By: John Parsons
Copyright: 2007
Contact Email: mailto:JohnP@...



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How To Boost Productivity Using OLAP Tools
Copyright (c) 2007 John Parsons
Radar-Soft, LLC.
http://www.radar-soft.com/



You might have heard about OLAP, but did you know why it could be
so important for anyone who wants to know more about any data
stored in a database or warehouse? This article shows why
OLAP-tools are widely used by people of any profession, and why
it is so important to have well-represented visual information
instead of raw data to take reasonable and important decisions.

Why is OLAP so important?

The main reason why OLAP is so important is its flexibility. Once
a user defines dimensions and measures of interest, the OLAP-tool
gives an incredibly easy way to analyze data by moving these
dimensions and measures into needed areas.

Anyone who ever tried to make a cross-tab report, will appreciate
the ease of the approach, when you just place the dimension you
want in the report position you want. And though it is quite
important, the ability to create a cross-tab report is not the
final goal OLAP would achieve. The ultimate result is
representing data as information that a person could easily
understand and use.

Let's take a manager of the marketing department working with a
database of all transactions made for the last year. There might
be thousands or millions of records in this database. So to
answer a simple question like "What is the trend of sales of a
given item in the given area?" he will most likely have to
analyze all sales for the given timeframe and make a visual
representation of the sales history, and then calculate possible
future values for the same dimensions. And though databases allow
one to know sales summary for any period in no time at all,
visual representation may be a quite hard task. At the same time
most of the OLAP-tools can solve this task with ease. And that
gives the analyst a chance to concentrate on thinking rather than
on mining the information to think about.

OLAP is useful because it allows one to find out the reason why
data looks like it does, i.e. determine the main reason that
affects the data. For example, if the sales of a trade company
are way up or way down for a given quarter, it is quite easy to
find out what product or what region makes the changes. Then
expanding the dimension members of interest it is very easy to
drill down into progressively more detail, but only to such
extent that one may spot a trend or a problem.

OLAP Types

As any technology this one doesn't have a single solution. There
are four major approaches to OLAP: MOLAP, ROLAP, HOLAP, and
DOLAP.

Multidimensional Online Analytical Processing (MOLAP) is the most
standard approach to OLAP solutions. It uses a multidimensional
database, which directly stores the information contained in the
various cubes.

Relational Online Analytical Processing (ROLAP) provides the same
solution but uses a relational database for data storage. This
approach translates native OLAP queries, written in a language
called multidimensional expressions (MDX) into the appropriate
SQL statements. This is primarily done to prevent the need for
another copy of the data. The data created directly by the online
transaction processing (OLTP) applications are used. The primary
disadvantage to this solution is that it does not perform as well
as a MOLAP, and has a little poorer ability because SQL
expressions are not always able to reproduce multidimensional
expressions adequately.

Hybrid Online Analytical Processing (HOLAP) is a hybrid approach
to the solution where the aggregated totals are stored in a
multidimensional database while the detail data is stored in the
relational database. This is the balance between the data
efficiency of the ROLAP model and the performance of the MOLAP
model.

Desktop Online Analytical Processing (DOLAP) is a convenient way
to get easy-to-use and comfortable access to your OLAP data from
within your desktop applications. This approach assumes that the
data is stored in a relational database, but it is loaded onto
client computer to create a multidimensional representation for a
user when or before a user requests his first slice. After that a
user is free to close the database connection and work as if the
data were stored on the client. The main advantage of this
approach is that the client may perform data processing itself
and so avoid OLAP servers' usage and installing. In case of web
OLAP applications, data processing is usually performed on an
application sever rather than on a client computer, however this
doesn't boost the system performance. This approach is widely
used and very popular in case of file databases like Access.

So OLAP solutions create new perspective of processing large
amount of data and allow converting the data into information and
useful answers to important questions.

Visual Analysis

While OLAP has been a kind of revolution in data analysis field,
it often cannot make the users entirely happy because of being
short of visual means of data representation. What would be the
use of a tool that gives out hundreds of numbers and provides no
means to make some conclusions of these numbers? And that's
where visual analysis can help.

Visual analysis is defined as analytical reasoning provided by
interactive visualization. The goal of visual analysis is to make
large datasets understandable and easy to analyze that is a major
intellectual challenge. The field of visual analysis is currently
a subject to apply to various fields like human-computer
interaction, scientific and information visualization,
statistical graphics and mathematical visualization, and
geographic information systems and cartography.

The idea is that it is quite difficult to answer questions by
working with a set of numbers. And even if the application
provides charting wizards or the like, it is not a good
alternative, because it is not good at finding out the answers to
deep questions, and often limited by a small amount of data. And
here comes the technology called "visual analysis", that is a
high performance software interface for visualizing questions to
multidimensional data in a meaningful manner.

Visual analysis means that the data should be presented in a way
that is easy to understand and think of visually. The right
presentation allows one to organize and understand information
you need. For example, you might want to see some emergency or
abnormal situations in your business at once, without digging
through a lot of numbers to identify an outlier. This is where
visual analysis comes out with its graphical and easy-to-spot
data representation.

Conclusion

There are a wide range of OLAP tools today giving the best chance
to make your data more clear. So why waste your time on searching
for regular occurrences in you data? OLAP-tools can make it for
you. It doesn't really matter if you're a professional data
analyst, or a marketing manager, or simply a person who collects
stamps. The rule is that if you have a database you might want to
use it to answer questions, and reveal some useful knowledge from
there.




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John Parsons writes for Radar-Soft. Founded in 2004, Radar-Soft,
LLC specializes on developing OLAP-tools for developers on
different developing platforms. Since that time Radar-Soft
team has made a lot of innovations implemented and working
in its products. Today Radar-Soft offers complex solutions
for different programming platforms including ASP.NET and
.NET Windows Forms. The wide range of solutions allows
developers of all kind to give their applications OLAP-
functionality with ease. ASP.NET solution can be tested
online at http://olaponline.radar-soft.com/default.aspx
You can know more about the Radar-Soft products at
http://www.radar-soft.com/


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