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Re: Help!!job interview on OLAP!!

From: Dave Cowden <cowden_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Wed, 5 May 1999 13:29:02 -0400
Message-ID: <7gsjo6$j6d$1@oak.prod.itd.earthlink.net>


I'm no expert in OLAP, but here is some stuff I do know:

OLAP:
OnLine Analytical Processing. Basically, applications that do lots of crunchin' of data in addition to storing data. While data warehouses are usually storage intensive, OLAP applications are more cpu-intensive because complex analysis is done with the data.

Here's some examples that might help:

Data Warehouse: Track all the car parts ever made in my plant, the operator that made them, and when they were made

OLTP: Allow millions of people to access my car factory and buy spare parts via the web, then store the transactions in the database.

OLAP: Track all the car parts made in my plant, and the operators that made them, and when they were made. Then tell me the optimal number of workers that I should have on each shift, show me a graph of the number of parts made as a function of time of day so I can figure out when my workers are most efficient, and tell me what the probability is that my workers will not be able to make 100000 parts in the next month based on the throughput in the last year.

Whether or not it is more difficult to support of course depends on your point of view, but many OLAP setups use a middle-ware production like Oracle Application Server inbetween the client and the data to perform the crunchin'-- thus from a pure administration standpoint there is probably more support because you have to support an application server and a database instead of just a database.

Reliability is the same as any other application: depends on the implementation.

HTH
Dave
Barry F. wrote in message <7gqqjg$de7$1_at_bgtnsc02.worldnet.att.net>...
>Can anyone tell me about OLAP? what does it do? what are the markets for
it?
>is it reliable? is it difficult to support?
>
>
Received on Wed May 05 1999 - 12:29:02 CDT

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