This post is about curious thoughts that I had during one of my internship when I had to implement an Oracle’s Hyperion Reporting software. I understood by that time that I was using an OLAP environment.
Wait, what is OLAP again? The concept surfaced again the last week. During the previous sessions, we explored the accounting transaction concept within an ERP system. We highlighted the 3 different types of data:
1. Master data
2. Organizational data
3. Transaction data
The ERP generates a huge volume of these data sets that need to be stored in two different ways, depending on the freshness: “Transaction” data for the current processes and “historical” data for past processes.
- OnLine Transactional Processing (OLTP) to process the current data needed to fulfill a current business process.
- OnLine Analytic Processing environment (OLAP) to analyze a huge amount of historical transactions.
OLAP environments needs a lot of processing power to aggregate all the historical data in order to provide the analysts with different “Views” of the overall data. Data are arranged by dimensions and can be modeled by a “Cube”.
You may also want to check out process mining as a cool way to analyze complete business processes!