MS SQL Server OLAP - Basic olap question

Author

Basic olap question - design

intrader

2005-11-28, 8:25 pm

We have a need to gather historical data from our database for analysis
purposes.
One team has designed a set of tables that would gather the historical
information.
I, on the otherhand, think that a cube would answer this requirement.

Please let me know what you'll think

Thanks

Denny Lee

2005-11-29, 3:23 am

Well, this really depends on what the end goal of your requirements are. In
general, having a set of tables of historical data will allow you to query
the detail data while having it stored within an OLAP cube will allow you to
store the aggregations. If you need only to know an aggregate like that
there were 500 books purchased a year ago, typically an OLAP cube will
suffice. But if you need to know the email addresses associated to the 500
books purchased, then it may be handy to keep the data in a set of
historical tables. Saying this, with Analysis Services 2005, you can
drillthrough directly into the OLAP cube to get to some of this detail data
just as long you assigned it to an attribute or measure to be read. It
really depends on how you designed the cube.

In general, OLAP for aggregation data and SQL tables for detail data. But
the boundary between the two is very wide where you can perform aggregate
queries against the SQL tables and detail drillthrough into the OLAP cubes.

--
HTH!
Denny Lee
< dennyglee_at_hotmail
_dot_com>

Blog at:: http://spaces.msn.com/members/denster/

"intrader" <intrader@aol.com> wrote in message
news:pan.2005.11.29.00.50.06.34391@aol.com...
> We have a need to gather historical data from our database for analysis
> purposes.
> One team has designed a set of tables that would gather the historical
> information.
> I, on the otherhand, think that a cube would answer this requirement.
>
> Please let me know what you'll think
>
> Thanks
>

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