Sams Teach Yourself Crystal Reports® 9 in 24 Hours

Chapter 20. Multidimensional Reporting Against OLAP Data

Through the first 19 hours, you have been exposed to a wide variety of the reporting capabilities found in Crystal Reports version 9. Up to this point, however, all the reports you have created were based on relational data sources—otherwise known as Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) databases—where most organizations generally keep their operational data.

In many organizations and for many people today, data reporting ends with Crystal Reports pointing at existing relational data sources such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Sybase, or even Microsoft Access. All these relational databases have been designed for the efficient storage of information. These databases were not ...