Preface

What this manual is about

The Oracle9i OLAP Services Concepts and Administration Guide for Windows describes how to use Oracle OLAP Services (hereinafter referred to as "OLAP Services") for business analysis. It introduces the concepts underlying analytical applications and multidimensional querying, and the tools used for application development and system administration.

This guide provides some information that is specific to Windows platforms. If you are using OLAP Services on a Unix system, refer to the Oracle9i OLAP Services Concepts and Administration Guide (Part Number A88755-01). It is located on the Oracle9i documentation CD.

Intended audience

This manual is intended for application developers and database administrators who are responsible for providing analytical services.

Before you begin

Before you can use OLAP Services, you must install Oracle9i Enterprise Edition.

Structure of this document

The Oracle9i OLAP Services Concepts and Administration Guide for Windows is structured as follows:

• Chapter 1 provides an introduction to online analytical processing and presents an overview of OLAP Services.

• Chapter 2 describes the programming environment for developing OLAP applications.

• Chapter 3 introduces the tools for administering OLAP Services.

• Chapter 4 describes how to set up your data warehouse and create metadata to support OLAP applications.

• Chapter 5 explains localization issues and explains how to choose the appropriate settings for the Oracle Globalization Support system.

• Chapter 6 identifies various ways of improving the performance of OLAP Services.

• Appendix A summarizes the differences between Express Server and OLAP Services. If you are upgrading from Express Server, you should read this first.

Related Documentation

This manual is part of a set of documentation, which also includes the following books:

• Oracle9i OLAP Services Developer's Guide to the Oracle OLAP API. Introduces Java programmers to the Oracle OLAP API, the application programming interface for Oracle OLAP Services. Through OLAP Services, the OLAP API provides access to data stored in an Oracle database. The OLAP API's capabilities for querying, manipulating, and presenting data are particularly suited to applications that perform online analytical processing.

• Oracle9i OLAP Services OLAP API Reference. Provides online reference documentation for the Oracle OLAP API, the Java application programming interface for Oracle OLAP Services.

• Oracle9i OLAP Services Developer's Guide to the OLAP DML. Explains how application developers can perform complex data analysis tasks (such as forecasts, models, allocations, and some types of non-additive aggregation) by using the OLAP DML.

• Oracle9i Data Warehousing Guide. Discusses the database structures, concepts, and issues involved in creating a data warehouse to support OLAP solutions.