Database Reference
In-Depth Information
How many item #123
were sold to Vanco?
Customers
Smiths
Big Store
Vanco
Shirts
Pants
Shorts
How many shirts were
sold in January?
How many items were
sold in total?
FIGURE 2.5
OLAP display information in the form of a cube so that analysts can visualize the
information.
Oracle's Essbase is a multidimensional online analytical processing
(OLAP) server, designed to help business users forecast likely business
performance levels and deliver what-if analyses for varying conditions.
Data is categorized in Essbase in the form of dimensions. Examples of dimen-
sions could be a time period or a product or a customer. Thus, a query might be
to compare actual sales for a product in a specified state during the month of
March 2014 with the corresponding budgeted value for that month. There are
often relationships between members of a dimension, and these relationships
are represented by a hierarchy. A hierarchy enables mathematical calculations
to be executed against the data. For example, all the sales for individual states
can be aggregated to create a value for the entire United States. Essbase allows
multiple hierarchies to be displayed along with the dimensions in the outline,
which can be seen on the left in Figure 2.6.
Big Data
Oracle has positioned their BI platform, Exalytics In-Memory Machine,
and Endeca Information Discovery software to ride the crest of the big
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