OLAP Data Attributes Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

The Data Warehouse Development Life Cycle

Online Analytical Processing and Oracle

Using Excel Pivot Tables For OLAP

Even data that does not appear directly can be displayed. For example, let’s say that normally we only display the sum of cost or the sum of sales, but today, we want to drag a dimension into the fact area of the pivot table. Dragging a non-numeric data attribute into the computation area of a pivot changes the fact from a sum to a count. As you can see in Figure 5.12, the number of orders that have been placed within each city are now counted and display by month. In this fashion, and data attribute can be counted, and it is not always necessary to include only numerical items in the body of the pivot table. Figure 5.13 shows the resulting pivot table, showing the counts of the number of orders within each region by month. We could count the number of any data attributes including the number of salespersons and customers. For example, we might want to count the number of customers, plotting this count by region and by month.

Figure 5.12 Counting within a pivot table.

Figure 5.13 The resulting pivot table of counts of orders.

Now that you understand how multidimensional database front ends function for decision support applications, let’s take a look at how data warehouses fit into multidimensional database frameworks.

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This is an excerpt from "High Performance Data Warehousing", copyright 1997.

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