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OLAP catalog is used in Oracle applications for the purpose of data mining and data warehousing.
By Odalys E. Anton
Of late data warehousing and data mining terminologies are gaining importance. Their application in financial services, marketing and sales, customer relationship management and many other business areas is being accepted widely. Because of this most of the database vendors have hitched themselves to the bandwagon. Oracle is one such which has not only organically developed but has also acquired niche data warehousing and data mining firms to consolidate its position in this field.
OLAP or OnLine Analytical Processing is a process of data consolidation and extraction of business intelligence as against OLTP which is OnLine Transaction Processing. OLAP consists of fact tables and dimension tables in which data is stored for facilitating data extraction. In Oracle this is called OLAP catalog. OLAP metadata maps to these fact and dimension tables. After normalizing, this data can be used by any analytical application.
By its very nature, data warehousing and data mining require data to be presented in a different manner than transaction processes. In Oracle there are two ways in which we can create OLAP metadata: Oracle Enterprise Manager and CWM2 PL/SQL APIs. With Enterprise manager we can view OLAP metadata created with its own API but cannot view the OLAP catalog metadata created with CWM2 PL/SQL APIs. However if metadata is created with CWM2 PL/SQL APIs , we can view metadata created with both. In practice most of the developers connected with Oracle are familiar with the Enterprise manager and are likely to go with it.
Creating OLAP metadata is a simple process (if you know how to do it). First one has to create the dimension tables which should be designed with the data warehousing and data mining processes in mind. We also have to design the hierarchies and relationships accordingly. The most important part of any OLAP design is mapping of the actual data with the metadata. In data warehousing, we should remember that processing happens with the metadata and this translation is therefore important. The last step is to create measure folders in which measures will be finally stored.
Access for manipulating various parameters is a frustrating experience but we have to live with it. But then this is true for any application with security features where we have to deal with different privileges.
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