SAS For Dummies

Chapter 12

OLAP: Impressing Your Co-workers

In This Chapter

Talking about cubes (sounds pretty square)

Getting to your OLAP data

Discovering more OLAP capabilities

Detailed historical or transactional data is useful for reporting and statistical analysis. In the real world, this data can grow to very large sizes with companies having millions or even billions of records on just one topic, such as sales transactions or customer history. As data grows to very large sizes, even systems like SAS can be slower than you might like, especially for data exploration where you want to ask multiple related questions of the data in quick succession.

OLAP (Online Analytic Processing) is a technology that pre-summarizes, stores, and accesses the data in a much more compact format than standard data tables (such as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, or Oracle tables). With OLAP, a billion-row table that takes five minutes to access in a traditional manner can be accessed from an OLAP aggregated form in a matter of seconds. SAS provides a server for storing your data as OLAP data, appropriately named the SAS OLAP Server. SAS Enterprise Guide can leverage the powerful capabilities of the SAS ...