White papers

Why OLAP – An Overview of On-line Analytical Processing

Executive summary:
The diversity and pace of today’s business require complementary tools that support greater variability of use and dynamic interaction with the data to support operational managers as they explore and evaluate interrelationships in the data. An operational manager doing trend analysis on a particular product line would require a mountain of spreadsheets and static reports to accommodate his/her analysis needs, an approach that is not desired or sustainable.

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools meet the need for interactive multidimensional reporting and analysis. They allow operational managers to perform trend, comparative, and time-based analysis by enabling exploration of pre-calculated and summarized data along multiple dimensions. Operational managers can explore data first at a summary level, then drill down through the data hierarchy to examine increasingly granular levels of detail.

This document provides a brief description of On-Line Analytical Processing, its history, and some of the main features that define it.

Big Data: Handling Large Data Sources with Databeacon

Executive summary:
Operational managers and their I.T. staff look at Databeacon and immediately grasp the benefits of applying Business Analyics and Reporting to business decisions. In particular, they see that the analytic reporting features of Databeacon offer an attractive method to quickly gain insight into the mountains of data that now deluge their organizations.

The purpose of this document is to provide guidance in how to best treat large volumes of data, and to help correctly manage expectations.
This document is written for Databeacon Business Analyics and Reporting software, and assumes the reader has some understanding of Databeacon Open Client and its components, dimensional modeling, and RDBMS structures.