ROLAP / Relational Online Analytical Processing for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Querying Relational Databases for Complex Information"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

ROLAP / Relational Online Analytical Processing is a form of OLAP / Online Analytical Processing -- that performs dynamic multidimensional analysis of data in databases. The difference is that ROLAP / Relational Online Analytical Processing works for relational databases. The other works on multidimensional databases.

ROLAP / Relational Online Analytical Processing uses a three-tiered architecture. You submit a request for multidimensional analysis and then the engine converts the request to SQL and it's submitted to the database.

Then the database sends the information back, the ROLAP / Relational Online Analytical Processing converts it from SQL to a multidimensional format and you get your answer.

It requires more processing time and power but it supports larger user groups and greater amounts of data and therefore ROLAP / Relational Online Analytical Processing is the preferred choice of large businesses

It is a reporting tool providing users with the capability to do "drill" or "trend" analysis on large volumes of data. Types of drill analysis are:

drill-down (using lower level attribute)
drill-up (using higher level attribute)
drill-within (using attribute from same dimension not in main hierarchy)
drill-anywhere (using attributes from any dimension)
drill-across (using attributes from other dimensions)

ROLAP / Relational Online Analytical Processing servers contain both numeric and textual data, and can have both disciplined and ad hoc usage and can contain both detailed and summarized data.

It supports large databases while enabling good performance, platform portability, exploitation of hardware advances such as parallel processing, robust security, multi-user concurrent access (including read-write with locking), recognized standards, and openness to multiple vendors tools. ROLAP / Relational Online Analytical Processing is necessary because SQL does not support multidimensional manipulation of calculations.

Therefore, ROLAP / Relational Online Analytical Processing products must do these calculations either in the client software or intermediate server engine.

Next: SMIL Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language

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