The Data Store for OLAP Analysis

Before an organization may engage in OLAP analysis, leveraging cubes, the data must be denormalized from its primary operational OLTP system into a data warehouse, which consists of measures or “fact tables” for analysis, supporting by dimensions which provide context to the organization’s facts.

Once analytical requirements have been gathered, a project must be initiated to design the Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) process whereby the data warehouse is populated on an ongoing basis.

With the data warehouse populated, the organization may engage in strategic OLAP analysis.