Sunday, April 10, 2011

DWH Tutorial - 1

What is OLTP?
OLTP stands for Online Transaction Processing.
OLTP uses normalized tables to quickly record large amounts of transactions while making sure that these updates of data occur in as few places as possible. Consequently OLTP database are designed for recording the daily operations and transactions of a business. E.g. a timecard system that supports a large production environment must record successfully a large number of updates during critical periods like lunch hour, breaks, startup and close of work.

What are dimensions?
Dimensions are categories by which summarized data can be viewed. E.g. a profit summary in a fact table can be viewed by a Time dimension (profit by month, quarter, year), Region dimension (profit by country, state, city), Product dimension (profit for product1, product2).

What are fact tables?
A fact table is a table that contains summarized numerical and historical data (facts) and a multipart index composed of foreign keys from the primary keys of related dimension tables.

What are measures?
Measures are numeric data based on columns in a fact table. They are the primary data which end users are interested in. E.g. a sales fact table may contain a profit measure which represents profit on each sale.

What are aggregations?
Aggregations are precalculated numeric data. By calculating and storing the answers to a query before users ask for it, the query processing time can be reduced. This is key in providing fast query performance in OLAP.

What are cubes?
Cubes are data processing units composed of fact tables and dimensions from the data warehouse. They provide multidimensional views of data, querying and analytical capabilities to clients.

What is the PivotTable® Service?
This is the primary component that connects clients to the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Server. It also provides the capability for clients to create local offline cubes using it as an OLAP server. PivotTable® Service does not have a user interface, the clients using its services has to provide its user interface.



What are offline OLAP cubes?
These are OLAP cubes created by clients, end users or third-party applications accessing a data warehouse, relational database or OLAP cube through the Microsoft® PivotTable® Service. E.g. Microsoft® Excel™ is very popular as a client for creating offline local OLAP cubes from relational databases for multidimensional analysis. These cubes have to be maintained and managed by the end users who have to manually refresh their data.

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