Re: Is OLAP essentially for Large Enterprises

OLAP can be used successfully by any size organisation. I have implemented it for organisations ranging from tens of people to thousands and, if users have the right analytical skills, it can deliver great benefits.

If you are using SQL Server 7 or 2000 you should seriously look at the Analysis Services components. These do exactly waht you are looking for, calculating summaries for all combinations of data. You really need to have designed a suitable schema to get the most out of this though. From what you describe though it sounds like creating summary tables would give you the effect you need, you would then simply need to ensure that queries used the summary tables when appropriate. A good reporting tool, such as Business Objects, would take care of this for you.

Regards,

Simon

"Puneet Agarwal" <NOSPAM__puneetagarwal_at_india.com> wrote in message news:9rgmgq$tne7f$1_at_ID-99266.news.dfncis.de...
> I have been exploring OLAP for a few days and I see that it is a great
> technology targeted at large enterprises for analysis of the information.
 It
> has also been stressed that OLAP data is maintained separately of the OLTP
> data and updated periodically.
>
> But one of the features of OLAP is maintaining indexes to facilitate quick
> summing / Max over some dimensions of cubes. I need this feature even in
 the
> core database i.e. I want to maintain totals of trasactions over a period
 on
> day/month/year basis so that I can very quickly calculate the balances and
> sums on any given date. I feel that OLAP can help me do this but I could
 not
> find anywhere that OLAP may be used in this regard. Also, I feel if sums
 are
> maintained this way, It is possible for the RDBMS to execute nomal
> sum/avg/count queries very quickly taking the advantage of the sums etc.
> maintained in the cubes. I could not find any such mention in both SQL
> Server and Oracle documentation.
>
> Please guide me about this.
> Please also refer me some good resource where I can learn more.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
>
>
>
Received on Mon Oct 29 2001 - 02:02:40 CST