Pro SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

Chapter 1. Introduction to OLAP

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).

Figure 1.1. Tabular order data

Figure 1.2. Summarizing products by month ordered

This is an interesting report, but what if we want to ...