Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a technology that is used to
create decision support software. OLAP enables application users to quickly
analyze information that has been summarized into multidimensional views and
hierarchies. By summarizing predicted queries into multidimensional views
before run time, OLAP tools provide the benefit of increased performance over
traditional database access tools. Most of the resource-intensive calculation
that is required to summarize the data is done before a query is submitted.
One of the advantages of OLAP is how data and its relationships are stored
and accessed. OLAP systems house data in structures that are readily available
for detailed queries and analytics.
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