Page 62 - DCAP606_BUSINESS_INTELLIGENCE

Unit 4: Understanding OLAP

A metadata block can contain individual metadata pieces such as an author or creation Notes
time and additional metadata blocks.

To get access to metadata, a completely qualified query expression must be used in most
cases.
The simplest metadata query expression is an expression to get a query reader/writer for
an exact metadata block.
OLAP delivers the simplest form of analysis, permitting any person to slice and dice
interrelated subsets of data or “cubes” with the click of a mouse.

Metadata (metacontent) are generally found in the business card catalogues of libraries.
Sample elements include technical data such as scanner type and model, resolution, bit
depth, colour space, file format, compression, light source, owner, copyright date etc.

One major advantage of metadata is that redundancy and inconsistencies can be identified
more easily as the metadata is centralized.

4.9 Keywords

Calculated member: It is a member of a dimension whose worth is calculated at run time by
utilizing an expression.
Cube: It is a data structure that aggregates the measures by the levels and hierarchies of each of
the dimensions that you want to analyse.
Descriptive metadata: Descriptive metadata describes a resource for purposes such as discovery
and identification.
Dimension: A set of one or more organized hierarchies of levels in a cube that a user understands
and benefits as the base for data analysis.

Hierarchy: A logical tree structure that organizes the members of a dimension.
Level: Within a hierarchy, data can be organized into smaller and higher levels of detail.
Measure: It is a set of values in a cube that are founded on a column in the cube's detail table and
that are generally numeric types.
Member: An item in a hierarchy comprising one or more occurrences of data.
Metadata block: A metadata block is a named group of metadata in a specific format.

4.10 Review Questions

1. Write down the meaning of OLAP.
2. Discuss the components of OLAP.

3. What are the advantages of OLAP?
4. “Hyperion Essbase consistently delivers very quick query response times that make an
iterative environment for analytic queries possible”. Elaborate.

5. What are the metadata based queries?
6. Discuss about the anatomy of a Path expression.
7. Describe the block selection.

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