Take a Moment to Reconsider OLAP

Feb 25, 2020

reconsidering-olap-an-olap.com-blog-postWe are loving this article by Neil Raden on diginomica.com, I’m Feeling Sentimental about OLAP and You Should Too. In it Raden makes the case that the OLAP tech that existed in the 90’s plus the new strides that have been made in recent years as far as scale, speed, CPU power, and functionality, makes OLAP a very strong contender in the business solutions space.

In his article, Raden writes, “OLAP gave people the ability to interact visually with the data and explore it using the multidimensional models of attributes, metrics, filters, and calculations, at minimum. Without code.” This is still an amazing value proposition! He admits, “OLAP had lots of drawbacks, but many of them have been resolved by the advance of computing resources. A mid 90’s OLAP implementation may have been running in 1/100,000th the resources routinely available now.”

Raden takes the reader through some important basics about OLAP tech, and it is definitely worth reading through his succinct explanations. One that really resonated with us at OLAP.com is this about the need for OLAP: “All of the data science in the world can’t match the capability of OLAP to explain the status of an organization, because at the end of the day, someone still has to count the beans.” And we know this to be true.  And we are all about smarter, faster, better ways to count those beans and make better business decisions.

Find Neil Raden’s original article here on diginomica.com