Introduction to OLAP
Philo Janus, Guy Fouché · Apress eBooks · 2010
Online analytical processing (OLAP) is a technique for aggregating data to enable business users to dig into transactional data to solve business problems. You may be familiar with pivot tables from Microsoft Excel or other reporting solutions—for example, taking a list of order details (Figure 1-1) and creating a table that shows the total for each product ordered by month (Figure 1-2).