August 25, 2010 at 11:22 pm
HI,
I'm new to these concepts? i've one basic doubt about
what is data warehouse and OLAP?
What i understood is, data warehouse is like relational database, where olap is having different storage structure as in cubes.
IS I'M RIGHT?
Please help me
🙂
August 26, 2010 at 5:22 am
A data warehouse is in most systems indeed like a relational database. The biggest difference is that traditional databases tend to keep only operational records in a normalized table structure, while a data warehouse will keep a history of data in a dimensional structure (meaning, in a star schema with fact tables and dimension tables).
This is of course oversimplified.
An OLAP cube is something totally different. OLAP will read the relational database (a traditional database or a data warehouse) and it will pre-aggregate some data, to speed up query performance. An OLAP cube is traditionally used for analytical purposes and it will allow users to easily slice and dice through the cube and to drill up and down through the data. The data itself in the cube is not stored in ordinary tables as in a database.
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MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP
August 26, 2010 at 10:41 pm
da-zero (8/26/2010)
A data warehouse is in most systems indeed like a relational database. The biggest difference is that traditional databases tend to keep only operational records in a normalized table structure, while a data warehouse will keep a history of data in a dimensional structure (meaning, in a star schema with fact tables and dimension tables).This is of course oversimplified.
An OLAP cube is something totally different. OLAP will read the relational database (a traditional database or a data warehouse) and it will pre-aggregate some data, to speed up query performance. An OLAP cube is traditionally used for analytical purposes and it will allow users to easily slice and dice through the cube and to drill up and down through the data. The data itself in the cube is not stored in ordinary tables as in a database.
short and sweet....:cool::cool::cool:
Raunak J
August 27, 2010 at 1:28 am
One of the other big differencies between a relational database and a datawarehouse is that you'll see more denormalization in a datawarehouse.
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