OLAP, OLTP

Whereas data warehouses and data marts are the data stores for analysis data, online analytical processing (OLAP) is the technology that enables client applications to efficiently access this data. OLAP provides many benefits to analytical users, for example:

• An intuitive multidimensional data model makes it easy to select, navigate, and explore the data.
• An analytical query language provides power to explore complex business data relationships.
• Precalculation of frequently queried data enables very fast response time to ad hoc queries.

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Services is a robust OLAP tool that can be used with data stored in various data warehouse databases, including SQL Server, Microsoft Access, and Oracle databases

Individual transactions are completed quickly and access relatively small amounts of data. OLTP systems are designed and tuned to process hundreds or thousands of transactions being entered at the same time.

Although OLTP systems excel at recording the data required to support daily operations, OLTP data is not organized in a manner that easily provides the information required by managers to plan the work of their organizations. Managers need summary information from which they can analyze trends that affect their organization or team. They need to find the critical factors affecting the success of their organization, and how best to adjust those factors to improve the success of the enterprise. They need to find how the workload of their enterprise is affected by seasonal and yearly trends so that they can predict how many employees and resources will be required to perform future work.