What is OLAP?

It stands for Online Analytical Processing.1

Use case(s)

  • Business intelligence.
  • Analytics.
  • Reporting.

Does it almost always have a time series aspect?

  • I would assume this is true since a static view of business intelligence doesn’t seem very valuable.

It also has different flavours:

  • ROLAP, relational OLAP
    • Operates directly on relational tables
    • Relies on SQL, required SQL queries required are complex and les performant.
  • HOLAP, hybrid OLAP

OLAP vs OLTP

OLTP stands for Online transaction processing

Footnotes

  1. https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/olap