- Year not given · 4+6 marks
Uses of OLAP; OLAP vs OLTP
Short answer
OLAP is used for multidimensional business analysis, reporting, budgeting, forecasting, what-if analysis, exception finding, and supporting data mining. OLTP handles daily short transactions with current detailed normalised data, while OLAP handles complex queries over historical summarised multidimensional data.
What are the uses of OLAP? Compare OLAP with OLTP.
Uses of OLAP
- Multidimensional analysis of business data (sales by product, region and time).
- Reports, dashboards and executive information.
- Budgeting, planning and forecasting.
- Trend and what-if analysis, comparing actual and target.
- Finding exceptions and areas needing attention using drill-down.
- Supports data mining by providing summarised, clean multidimensional data.
- Applications: sales and marketing analysis, financial reporting, customer profitability, inventory and supply chain analysis.
OLAP vs OLTP
| Point | OLTP | OLAP |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Day-to-day transactions | Analysis, decision support |
| Users | Clerks, clients, DBAs | Managers, analysts, executives |
| Data | Current, detailed, flat relational | Historical, summarised, multidimensional |
| Database design | ER model, normalised, application-oriented | Star/snowflake, subject-oriented |
| Access | Read/write, short transactions | Mostly read, complex queries |
| Unit of work | Short, simple transaction | Complex query with aggregates |
| Records per access | Tens | Millions |
| Number of users | Thousands | Hundreds |
| DB size | MB to GB | GB to TB |
| Metric | Transaction throughput | Query response time |
✓ Answer checked by Claude Opus 5.5 (high effort)
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