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.