OLAP & Its operations

OLAP is a category of software that allows users to analyze

information from multiple database systems at the same time.

It is a technology that enables analysts to extract and view business

data from different points of view.
 OLAP server
• The chief component of datawarehouse process is the
OLAP server.

• Sits between a client and a database management

systems (DBMS).

• Online Analytical Processing Server (OLAP) is based on

the multidimensional data model.

• Data can be imported from existing relational databases

to create a multidimensional database for OLAP.

• It allows managers, and analysts to get an insight of the

information through fast, consistent, and interactive
access.
 Cubes

• The data structures used in the OLAP are

multidimensional data cubes or OLAP cubes:

• Cube is a data structure that can be imagined as

multi-dimensional spreadsheet.

• Take a spreadsheet, put year on columns,

product on rows – that’s two-dimensional cube.
 Typical OLAP Operations
• Roll up (drill-up): summarize data
– by climbing up hierarchy or by dimension reduction (Eg. City->country)
• Drill down (roll down): reverse of roll-up
– Navigate from higher level summary to lower level summary or detailed data, or
introducing new dimensions (Eg. Quarter -> Month)
• Slice and dice:
– project and select
• Pivot (rotate):
– reorient the cube, visualization, 3D to series of 2D planes.

July 31, 2023 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 5

 Roll up (drill-up)
• The roll-up operation (also
called drill-up or aggregation
operation) performs
aggregation on a data cube,
either by climbing up a
concept hierarchy for a
dimension
• i.e. dimension reduction.
Roll down (drill-down)
The roll down operation (also called
drill down) is the reverse of roll up.
It navigates from less detailed data to
more detailed data.
It can be realized by either stepping
down a concept hierarchy for a
dimension or
introducing additional dimensions.
Slice
Slice performs a projection of one dimension of the given cube,
thus resulting in a subcube.
 Dice
The dice operation defines
a subcube by performing a
selection on two or more
dimensions.
Reduces the number of
member values of one or
more dimensions.
 Pivot

• Rotates the data axis to view the data from

different perspectives.
• Groups data with different dimensions.