OLAP or Relational? Its all irrelevant
Chris Webb has mentioned an article about
Ralph Kimball that discusses the what tool you
should be using at the end of your BI process to present back to users. Should
it be OLAP based or Relational based.
We had exactly the same discussion in the pub after the
UG meeting last week. In my view its just data, OLAP is juts another big index
and MDX a means by which you can represent a query of that index. Just like we
have partitioning and windowing now in SQL 2005, why in the future can't we just have OLAP structures in
the "database" in the future.
That way a user doesn't have to care what the structure is, they query using
a tool and get the best response.
Ok so you still hav to design your OLAP structures, but its just another
structure, we have to design tables, indexes, full text indexes, partitioning,
XML indexes. Why not just have another structure?
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