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You can get more value from the data you are storing in your Oracle database or data warehouse just by applying OLAP to solve business problems. Oracle OLAP, embedded in Oracle Database, extends your reporting environment with sophisticated forecasting, trending and statistical analysis to help you improve overall business performance. By leveraging your Oracle data source for relational and multidimensional analysis, you can:

 

Exploit OLAP calculation engine using easy to use SQL tools - Oracle Business Intelligence, Business Objects, or Cognos

Dramatically increase performance for complex queries

Reduce costs by eliminating standalone, proprietary multidimensional databases tools

Facilitate single version of the truth by eliminating data fragmentation

Deploy to a large number of concurrent users through a scalable platform

 

Applications of OLAP in various LOBs include:

Application	Types of Analysis	Typical Query
Financial Planning	Corporate budgeting, forecasting, revenue and cost scenarios, what-if analysis.	Develop revenue plans and spending budgets. Estimate earnings per share, cost and revenue projections. Tax forecasting
Accounting	Internal and statuary reporting	Internal reports such as, balance sheets & income statements
Human Resources	Scheduling and distribution optimization	What are the forecasted product sales? Where will they ship?
Sales Force Automation	Cross-selling and territory analysis	Who are the top and bottom sales reps? Who is over/under quota? How does my company's sales compare with my industry?
Marketing	Category management and promotion analysis	What products are selling the worst/best? Which products are experiencing growth and which are in decline? Do certain demographics show price sensitivity for certain products? What incremental revenue/volume can be attributed to a promotion? Is the promotion cost effective?

 

Applications of OLAP in various industries include: 

Application	Types of Analysis	Typical Query
Financial Services	Risk Management and assessment	Categorization of organization by risk factor?
Retail	Site location and demographic analysis	What is the correlation between demographic characteristics of current customers and the demographic characteristics of a proposed store location?
Manufacturing	Demand planning and forecasting	How much product should be produced? When and where should it be sold?
Health Care	Cost analysis	Cost per health care incident/encounter? Show the cost comparisons between different health care providers by demographic group and geography?
Pharmaceuticals	Clinical trial analysis	Patient outcomes based on treatment and demographic groups?

Key Features

 

 

 

Benefits

 

 

Frequent Asked Questions

 

Oracle lacks the mindshare in OLAP technology?

Says who? The authors of the only market share report available admit that they have no accurate source to validate revenue numbers. In fact we see an increasing demand for our OLAP solutions. Customers who have been actively using Oracle OLAP include:

 

 

We are already evaluating MS SQL Server Analysis Services.

SQL Server is optimized specifically for data mart implementations and requires the need to build and maintain a separate, specialized analytical server. SQL Server is ONLY able to support a small number of users who need access to small data sets and perform simple queries. Query response times with SQL Server are very unpredictable and can be a real problem for end-users.

 

Since OLAP is no longer limited to a few specialized data analysts, you must consider the following: What will happen to query performance when your data grows or the number of OLAP users grow? Oracle9i OLAP requires no data movement and was specifically designed to support Enterprise-scale OLAP so you can extend OLAP functionality to users across the entire enterprise while leveraging Oracle RDBMS reliability, scalability, and performance.

 

Oracle is too expensive.

Sure MSFT has a low entry price, however, you must also consider the following:

 

MSFT does less. Microsoft has a limited range of analytic functionality (i.e statistical forecasting, procedural calculations.

 

Microsoft has very poor user scalability and will not scale as your business grows. As a result, Microsoft requires much more server (i.e CPU) power. And, since some processing occurs on the PC, a high-end PC is required for best query response. It simply lacks the basic scalability (RAC, Table Compression), performance (indexes, optimizers), and security features needed for high performance OLAP applications.

 

Microsoft requires client applications which only understand MDX (which is Microsoft's proprietary multidimensional language), so your DBAs have yet another proprietary language to learn.

 

How much time can your DBAs afford to spend moving and maintaining data in 2 separate servers? Microsoft "claims" integration, Oracle delivers it!

 

In the end, with Microsoft what you save on license costs will be paid for in hardware and maintenance costs. With Oracle, you may spend a little more for licensing, but you will spend much less on hardware and maintenance cost. And, you leverage your existing investment in SQL tools, applications, and expertise.

 

We don't have data warehouse yet.

You don't have to have a data warehouse apply OLAP to your data. Based on your application, you can determine which variables you need to store for OLAP and then build the data warehouse in parallel.

 

We don't have any OLAP expertise.

Oracle Data Mining is easy to use, especially when leveraging Oracle skills in house. Also, we have Oracle Consultants to help you. Oracle Data Mining simplifies and automate data mining so that end users don't have to be data mining experts.