Special Edition Using® Crystal Reports® 10

Introduction to OLAP

Through the first 15 chapters, you have been exposed to a wide variety of the reporting capabilities found in Crystal Reports. Up to this point, however, all the reports you have created were based on relational data sources—often 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 designed optimally, however, for the efficient extraction ...