Designing a Data Warehouse: Supporting Customer Relationship Management

OLAP

The term on-line analytical processing, or OLAP, was first used in the early 1990s. We could be forgiven for imagining that this was when, so called, OLAP products first started to appear. Not so. All OLAP products are founded on the principle of the dimensional model that was described and discussed at length in the early chapters of this book, and analysis products based upon dimensional models have been around since the 1970s. In the mid-1980s there was quite a strong set of competing products although, at the time, they were generally being marketed under the heading of executive information systems (EIS). Some of the products that existed in those days have survived, by a certain amount of evolution and adaptation by new owners, to ...