Introduction to OLAP and Its Role in Business Intelligence - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services - page 3

CHAPTER 1

IN THIS CHAPTER

. The Multidimensional Data

Model

Introduction to OLAP
and Its Role in Business
Intelligence

I n the past decade, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services
established itself as one of the leaders in the Business
Intelligences systems market. Analysis Services helps
managers, employees, customers, and partners to make
more informed business decisions by enabling them to
analyze information accumulated during a company's day-
to-day operations.

Success of Analysis Services and the entire Business
Intelligence market was predefined by incredible growth of
amounts of data accumulated as a result of everyday func-
tioning of a large number of companies. Today it's hard to
imagine a business or an organization that doesn't use an
online transaction processing (OLTP) system. OLTP systems
provide means to highly efficient execution of a large
number of small transactions and reliable access to data
stored in the result of the transactions.

The volume of the data stored and processed for one day by
an OLTP system could be several gigabytes per day; after a
period of time, the total volume of data can reach to the
tens and even hundreds of terabytes. Such a large volume of
data can be hard to store, but it is a valuable source of
information for understanding the way the enterprise func-
tions. This data can prove very helpful for making projec-
tions that lead to successful strategic decisions, and for
improving everyday decision making.

It's easy to see why analysis of data has become so impor-
tant to the management of modern enterprises. However,
OLTP systems are not well suited to analyzing data. In the
past decades, an entire new market has emerged for systems
that can provide reliable and fast access for analyzing very
large amounts of data: online analytical processing (OLAP).