OLAP Today

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OLAP Today
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Agenda

• History of OLAP
• OLAP Market Place
• Top 10 OLAP uses
• OLAP in Business
• Success Factors and Common Mistakes
• How OLAP is used (including Demonstration)

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OLAP History Pre Y2K
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Post Y2K
Source OLAP Report http//www.olapreport.com/orig
ins.htm
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OLAP Market Place

• Types of products in the Australian Market
• Business Intelligence Suites
• OLAP Servers
• DBMS OLAP Services
• Niche and open source
• Package add-ons

Business Objects
Cognos
SAS
TM1
MicroStrategy
Hyperion
Microsoft
Oracle
IBM
Teradata
Pentaho Jasper
Zap
Microsoft (Office)
SAP
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OLAP Market Place

• Trends impacting the OLAP market place
• Only the strong survive
• Rationalisation is seeing many OLAP and BI
  companies acquired by big database and BI
  players
• OLAP Service vs. Business Intelligence
• OLAP functionality is subdividing between the
  serving of data and the delivery of data
• Commoditisation
• Microsoft impacting market through low cost OLAP
  and related capability
• Barriers to entry are being removed

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Top 10 OLAP uses

• Performance Measurement Systems
• Budgeting Planning applications
• Sales Analysis Reporting
• Financial Reporting
• Substitute for a Data Warehouse
• BI Prototyping
• No Number 7!
• Prelude to sophisticated Analytics (Forecasting,
  business modelling, what if)
• Data Validation (values, quality, modelling)
• Data Distribution via cubes

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OLAP in Business

• How OLAP is used in business
• Understanding business performance
• What is happening, why is it happening
• Last periods data, trends and comparisons
• Competitive analysis
• Where competitive data is available
• Trend analysis
• Predict what will happen
• Lead-in to data mining
• Do we know the variables?

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OLAP in Business

• Features important to business
• Roll Up
• All sales offices have the same structure but
  their own data
• Head office has all sales offices data aggregated
• Drill down
• Show me the sales in Victorian region by postcode
• Slice and dice, pivot
• Show sales by metro vs. rural
• Show sales by age of manager
• Show sales this month vs. this month last year

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OLAP in Business

• OLAP features that add value
• Drill through
• Show me all the individual transactions for
  yesterday
• Give me the details of exceptions identified
• Privacy can be an issue must match the privacy
  of source
• Time is a critical dimension for analysis
• Trend over past year(s)
• This month to last month
• This month to this month last year
• Common depth is 13 months, some go further

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OLAP in Business

• The reality of OLAP today
• Majority of business people just want a report
• 80 will not manipulate data, even if they are
  taught
• Self service reporting pressing Print
• Companies now more cautious of analysis for its
  own sake
• OLAP sales address turning data into wisdom
• More focus is on outcome, not the process

Data
Information
Knowledge
Action
Outcome
Value
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OLAP in Business

• The reality of OLAP technology today
• OLAP is part of a broader Business Intelligence
  suite
• Must provide decent reporting
• Must support dashboards
• May need to deliver spatial and visual delivery
• OLAP today BI OLAP Server
• Backend cube structures and architectures are
  becoming more adaptable
• There is no need to lock in to ROLAP vs. MOLAP
  vs. others

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Common Mistakes

• Not training end users
• Over complicating cube design - Not Keeping it
  Simple (KISS)
• Too many Categories
• Too many Dimensions
• Too many Hierarchies
• Cube(data) explosion
• Avoiding Data Quality Issues
• Expecting Spreadsheet behaviour!

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The Best OLAP applications

• Are designed as part of a Data Warehousing
  architecture
• Share metadata with other reporting components
• Simple!
• Well mapped to Business Model/Rules

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Demo OLAP User Interface
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Demo Data Transformation (Cube Build) Process