The Oracle OLAP Solution

Oracle9i supports business intelligence

Analytical queries require an online analytical processing (OLAP) solution. Oracle provides comprehensive support for OLAP:

• The Oracle relational database management system (RDBMS) is an efficient and secure way to store vast amounts of data. Within the Oracle database, you can create a data warehouse that provides data in a form suitable for business analysis.

• OLAP Services provides a Java OLAP API, a calculation engine, and an analytic workspace. These facilities enable you to build analytical applications that support complex statistical, mathematical, and financial calculations along with predictive analysis functions such as forecasting, modeling, consolidations, allocations, and scenario management. Because the OLAP API is all Java, OLAP Services supports deployment of analytical applications to large, geographically distributed user communities on the Internet.

• The Oracle BI Beans complements OLAP Services by providing pre-built OLAP-aware application building blocks. The BI Beans can be used within Oracle JDeveloper or other Java development environments to build analytical applications, which can be deployed as either Java or HTML ("thin") clients.

This guide explains the relationships among these components from the perspective of both the system administrator and the application developer.

Complementary functionality

The Oracle RDBMS and OLAP Services provide complementary functionality to support the most versatile and high performance applications. The RDBMS provides detail data, summary management, and one-dimensional calculations using the SQL-99 OLAP extensions. OLAP Services expands these capabilities to provide forecasting, modeling, what-if scenarios, and multidimensional calculations.