OLAP

http://oracleolap.blogspot.com/2008/03/olap-workshop-7-creating-calculated.html

http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/olap.html

I found these two sites while researching for my chapter 3 team presentation. I plan on discussing these briefly during my presentation tomorrow but thought I should still talk about them here. The first is Oracle OLAP's blog run my some employees of Oracle OLAP. It contains information about Oracle OLAP such as new features, events, and workshops. I thought this was interesting because it gives a personal view of OLAP from people who work with it every day.

The second is the OLAP section of Oracle's main website. The site states that OLAP is "a calculation engine that supports the entire spectrum of advanced analytical applications including planning, budgeting, forecasting sales, and marketing to help identify key business trends and model complex business scenarios." This site provides the benefits of using Oracle OLAP which including much faster and higher quality information for decision makers and lower IT costs and complexity. This site also provides web support for users and a number of success stories of businesses who have implemented OLAP. The Project Leader and Business Analyst, Siebe Beintema, of Audax (one of the success stories) was quoted saying "We have seen impressive results from our first use of Oracle 9iOLAP multidimensional Analytic Workspaces with the Business Objects front end. The query performance improvements delivered are great, while the calculation functionality is a real advantage. Using the open SQL access of the multidimensional engine of the Oracle OLAP Option will allow us to provide better analysis to more people more quickly that ever before, and, as the cubes can be in the same Universe as other data in our data warehouse, the ease of use and administration is also much easier than if we had to resort to standalone OLAP cubes." It was interesting to see real quotes and success stories from the use of OLAP in addition to those mentioned in the text.