If You Think OLAP is Obsolete… Think Again!
If you think OLAP is Obsolete,
A couple things could be possible:
You don’t know what OLAP is.
You haven’t seen a recent OLAP application.
You never tried to do the knitty-gritty of business planning.
You’ve resigned yourself to doing manual labor in Excel spreadsheets and pushing to a dashboard.
OK, so I’ll give nay-sayers of OLAP a little bit of credit, OLAP (historically) can be frustrating. Especially when some implementations are hardly what we consider to be “online”. Most of what people are calling OLAP technology is not really connected in a live way to the data source. There is a batch process to update the data from relational source to a Proprietary OLAP cube.
Now that is where you lose most of the IT people. Ugh OLAP, really? IT Teams need a proprietary system to maintain like a hole in the head, because they are already underwater just trying to make sure all the delicate connections between systems are running. They just want to know that processes are able to finish running, and that their end-users are eventually served with the data they need.
The new batch of more evolved OLAP systems will address all those painful processes and more. And how dare anyone call that obsolete?! That is the opposite of obsolete—it is what you need—a platform which allows you to:
1.) Connect the relational source to the “cube” or multidimensional modeling space
2.) Consolidate several data sources
3.) Easy access to consolidated source data in ANY front-end, and
4.) Live, real-time updates in a collaborative environment.
Never heard of an OLAP product that can do all that? Check out the Olation eBook for a quick intro. The most exciting things in OLAP have yet to come!
