Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Understanding SSAS and OLAP

Because OLAP is at the heart of SSAS, you need to understand what it is and how it solves the requirements of decision makers in a business. As you might already know, data warehousing requirements typically include all the capability needed to report on a business’s transactional history, such as sales history. This transactional history is often organized into subject areas and tiers of aggregated information that can support some online querying and usually much more batch reporting. Data warehouses and data marts typically extract data from online transaction processing (OLTP) systems and serve data up to these business users and reporting systems. In general, these are all called decision support systems (DSS), ...