Gavin Sherry wrote:> Seems like a fairly large amount of talk about stuff which should be
taken> care of internally by corporations who have such interests.
Not entirely. As a freelancer, I've used OLAP (front-end only, ie pivot
tables in Excel) to help me produce invoices from my timesheet data.
It's *very* useful. I found out, almost by accident, which client I've
spent the most time working for, and which client has the largest ratio
of unpaid to paid hours :-(
AFAIK, OLAP backends essentially provide a cache of denormalised data
that provide fast access (no need to re-run complex queries) to large
data sets, and a set of aggregate functions to analyse the data.
There's also a language called MDX that goes with it, but I haven't
worked with that.
bye
John
