Understanding Measures

A measure is an OLAP metadata entity. This means that it is a logical object, identified by name and owner, within the OLAP 2 Catalog.

Measures represent data stored in fact tables. The fact tables may be relational tables or views. The views may reference data stored in analytic workspaces.

Measures exist within the context of cubes, which fully specify the dimensionality of the measures' data. Cubes must exist for any data that you wish to make accessible to the Oracle OLAP API.

A measure's data can be accessed by specifying values for its dimensions. For example, a measure representing sales data might be dimensioned by time, product, and location. This means that the sales data can be accessed for a given time period, a given product, and a given location.

Note: A cube may contain multiple measures. All the measures of a cube share the same set of dimensions.