OLTP (On-line Transaction Processing) is characterized by a large number of short on-line transactions

(INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE). The main emphasis for OLTP systems is put on very fast query processing,
maintaining data integrity in multi-access environments and an effectiveness measured by number of
transactions per second. In OLTP database there is detailed and current data, and schema used to store
transactional databases is the entity model (usually 3NF).

- OLAP (On-line Analytical Processing) is characterized by relatively low volume of transactions. Queries
are often very complex and involve aggregations. For OLAP systems a response time is an effectiveness
measure. OLAP applications are widely used by Data Mining techniques. In OLAP database there is
aggregated, historical data, stored in multi-dimensional schemas (usually star schema).

The following table summarizes the major differences between OLTP and OLAP system design.

OLTP System OLAP System

Online Transaction Processing Online Analytical Processing
(Operational System) (Data Warehouse)
Operational data; OLTPs are the Consolidation data; OLAP data comes
Source of data
original source of the data. from the various OLTP Databases
Purpose of To control and run fundamental To help with planning, problem solving,
data business tasks and decision support
Reveals a snapshot of ongoing Multi-dimensional views of various kinds
What the data
business processes of business activities
Inserts and Short and fast inserts and updates Periodic long-running batch jobs refresh
Updates initiated by end users the data
Relatively standardized and simple
Often complex queries involving
Queries queries Returning relatively few
aggregations
records
 Depends on the amount of data involved;
Processing batch data refreshes and complex queries
Typically very fast
Speed may take many hours; query speed can be
improved by creating indexes
Larger due to the existence of aggregation
Space Can be relatively small if historical
structures and history data; requires more
Requirements data is archived
indexes than OLTP
Typically de-normalized with fewer
Database
Highly normalized with many tables tables; use of star and/or snowflake
Design
schemas
Backup religiously; operational data Instead of regular backups, some
Backup and is critical to run the business, data environments may consider simply
Recovery loss is likely to entail significant reloading the OLTP data as a recovery
monetary loss and legal liability method

Online Analytical Processing Server (OLAP) is based on the multidimensional data model. It
allows managers, and analysts to get an insight of the information through fast, consistent, and
interactive access to information. This chapter cover the types of OLAP, operations on OLAP,
difference between OLAP, and statistical databases and OLTP.

Types of OLAP Servers

We have four types of OLAP servers −

 Relational OLAP (ROLAP)

 Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP)
 Hybrid OLAP (HOLAP)
 Specialized SQL Servers

Relational OLAP

ROLAP servers are placed between relational back-end server and client front-end tools. To
store and manage warehouse data, ROLAP uses relational or extended-relational DBMS.

ROLAP includes the following −

 Implementation of aggregation navigation logic.

 Optimization for each DBMS back end.
 Additional tools and services.

Multidimensional OLAP

MOLAP uses array-based multidimensional storage engines for multidimensional views of data.
With multidimensional data stores, the storage utilization may be low if the data set is sparse.
Therefore, many MOLAP server use two levels of data storage representation to handle dense
and sparse data sets.

Hybrid OLAP

Hybrid OLAP is a combination of both ROLAP and MOLAP. It offers higher scalability of
ROLAP and faster computation of MOLAP. HOLAP servers allows to store the large data
volumes of detailed information. The aggregations are stored separately in MOLAP store.

OLTP

 OLTP stands for Online Transaction Processing.

 OLTP is a software program that supports high transaction – oriented applications.
 It is used for processing the system that responds immediately to the user requests.
 OLTP system is used for data entry, financial transactions, customer relationship management
(CRM) and retail sales.
 It is technically difficult to build.
 This system is characterized by a large number of short online transactions like Insert, Update,
Delete.
 It provides fast query processing, maintaining data integrity in multi-access environments.
 It includes detailed information about current data and schema used to store transactional
databases in the entity model.
 It provides a flexible platform for many applications like from ATM networks to computerized
shop floor automation.

Benefits of OLTP

 OLTP reduces paper work.

 It is faster and more accurate forecast for revenues and expenses.
 It makes things simpler for businesses.
 It handles large data, user volumes, more complex calculations and higher peak loads.

OLAP

 OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing.

 It is a powerful technology for data discovery.
 It performs multidimensional analysis of business data.
 It provides the capability for complex calculations, trend analysis and sophisticated data
modeling.
 It has the ability to achieve fast access to shared multidimensional information.
 It has the ability to create very fast aggregations and calculations of data sets.

OLAP can be divided into following types

1. MOLAP
2. ROLAP
3. HOLAP
1. MOLAP

 MOLAP stands for Multidimensional Online Analytical Processing.

 It is the classical form of OLAP and stores the data in an optimized multi-dimensional array
storage.

Advantages of MOLAP

 MOLAP is very compact for low dimension data sets.

 It has an effective data extraction achieved through the pre-structuring of aggregated data.
 It performs automated computation of higher level aggregation of the data.
 It performs fast query operation due to optimized storage, multidimensional indexing and
caching.

Disadvantages of MOLAP

 MOLAP comes with data redundancy.

 Sometimes the processing step can be lengthy, especially on large data.

2. ROLAP

 ROLAP stands for Relational Online Analytical Processing.

 It works with relational databases.
 ROLAP depends on specialized schema design.
 It has the ability to drill down to the lowest level in the database.

3. HOLAP

 HOLAP stands for Hybrid Online Analytical Processing.

 It uses relational tables to hold the larger quantities of detailed data.
 It uses specialized storage for some aspects of the smaller quantities of more-aggregate or less-
detailed data.
 It can utilize both pre-calculated cubes and relational data sources.

Advantages of OLAP

 OLAP increases the productivity of business managers, developers and the whole organization.
 It enables managers to solve the problems.
 It controls the access to strategic information for more effective decision making.
 It reduces the application backlog because of faster delivery of applications.
 It enables the organization to respond more quickly to market demands.
 It enables user to analyze multidimensional data interactively from multiple perspectives.
 It does not require large data warehouse.
 OLAP makes easy to produce analytic measures, including time-series calculations, financial
models, forecasts, allocations, regressions, etc.
 What is Business Intelligence?
The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the
collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information.

Business Ingelligence (BI) - technology infrastructure for gaining maximum information

from available data for the purpose of improving business processes. Typical BI
infrastructure components are as follows: software solution for gathering, cleansing,
integrating, analyzing and sharing data. Business Intelligence produces analysis and
provides believable information to help making effective and high quality business
decisions.

The most common kinds of Business Intelligence systems are:

  EIS - Executive Information Systems
  DSS - Decision Support Systems
  MIS - Management Information Systems
  GIS - Geographic Information Systems
  OLAP - Online Analytical Processing and multidimensional analysis
  CRM - Customer Relationship Management
Business Intelligence systems based on Data Warehouse technology. A Data
Warehouse(DW) gathers information from a wide range of company's operational
systems, Business Intelligence systems based on it. Data loaded to DW is usually good
integrated and cleaned that allows to produce credible information which reflected so
called 'one version of the true'.

Business Intelligence Concepts

It exist a lot of concepts and terms that it is necessary to know and handle when a team working
with Business Intelligence issues. In order to really understand all these concepts and its
relationships, it is necessary grouping these terms by functions inside the whole Business
Intelligence Design and Implementation.

Initial Concepts and Definitions...

Instead of established concepts, every organization establishes its own interpretations for every
term, so this article contains the most utilized interpretation for every term or concept.

From the functional point of view, we have these groups of components:

 Transactional or Operational Systems – Source Data Systems: The main source for business
intelligence data to be analyzed is all data captured, processed and reported by all core
transactional systems for the company or organization.
  Data Transfers Processes – Data Interfaces – ETL Processes: All necessary data must be
processed from source data systems to a specialized repositories or to show to final users. These
data interfaces are called ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) processes.

 Data Repositories: Depending on the size and the reach of this repository, it could be named
datawarehouse: when the stored data is about all organization or the most of this organization;
or could be named datamart when the stored data is about isolated departments or
organizational units.

 Final Users Tools: For obtaining, querying, analyzing and reporting valuable information, final
users have special tools that access datawarehouses and datamarts (even transactional data),
and these tools access the data dictionaries for document and inform to users what is the
accessed data and which is its meaning.

 Information Distribution and Control: Regular reports, news and other information must be
delivered in a timely and secure fashion to any selected way like email, mobile, web and others
to appropriate personnel.

Why do you need a BI framework?

A Business Intelligence framework can help you to structure the process of improving your
business intelligence and helps you to implement your Business Intelligence strategy in a very
cost effective way. Business Intelligence projects will be more successful, cost less and deliver
more value to your business users. In addition a BI-framework makes it possible that every user
– once logged on to the BI-system – sees instantly the information that is relevant for them.

What is in the Business Intelligence framework?

The Business Intelligence framework we offer consists of five key concepts:

 very high reusability achieved by object orientation & inheritance

 outstanding usability
 device neutral – portal, desktop, Smartphone, tablet
 high flexibility and role based
 vendor & tool independent

Framework of Business Intelligence

More and more businesses are moving towards business intelligence. The reason for this
movement is the business environment. Organizations are forced to capture, store and interpret
data. This data is at the core of business success. Organizations require correct information for
any decision-making process.
Business intelligence combines data warehousing, business analytics, performance, strategy
and user interface. Business receives data from various sources. This data is capture in the data
warehouse where it is stored, organized and summarized as per further utilization. Authorized
users can access this data and work on it to get desired results. This result than are shared to
executives for decision-making process. These data results can be published through dashboards
or share points.

Business Intelligence Architecture and Components

The main components of business intelligence are data warehouse, business analytics and
business performance management and user interface.

Data warehouse holds data obtained from internal sources as well as external sources. The
internal sources include various operational systems.

Business analytics creates a report as and when required through queries and rules. Data mining
is also another important aspect of business analytics.

Business performance management is a linkage of data with business objectives for efficient
tracking. This business performance is then broadcasted to an executive decision-making body
through dashboards and share-point.

Benefit of Business Intelligence

The benefits of Business intelligence are as follows:

 Business intelligence is faster more accurate process of reporting critical information.

 Business intelligence facilitates better and efficient decision-making process.
 Business intelligence provides timely information for better customer relationship management.
 Business intelligence improves profitability of the company.
 Business intelligence provides a facility of assessing organization’s readiness in meeting new
business challenges.
 Business intelligence supports usage of best practices and identifies every hidden cost.

Business intelligence usage can be optimized by identifying key projects on which company
would like to focus. This process of highlighting key projects is called business intelligence
governance.

The importance of business intelligence is growing, and its usage has proliferated across various
types of users. Earlier, it was in the domain of IT staff, but now business team is also
independently handling business intelligence.
Business Analysis Framework

The business analyst get the information from the data warehouses to measure the performance
and make critical adjustments in order to win over other business holders in the market. Having a
data warehouse offers the following advantages −

 Since a data warehouse can gather information quickly and efficiently, it can enhance
business productivity.
 A data warehouse provides us a consistent view of customers and items, hence, it helps
us manage customer relationship.
 A data warehouse also helps in bringing down the costs by tracking trends, patterns over
a long period in a consistent and reliable manner.

To design an effective and efficient data warehouse, we need to understand and analyze the
business needs and construct a business analysis framework. Each person has different views
regarding the design of a data warehouse. These views are as follows −

 The top-down view − This view allows the selection of relevant information needed for
a data warehouse.
 The data source view − This view presents the information being captured, stored, and
managed by the operational system.
 The data warehouse view − This view includes the fact tables and dimension tables. It
represents the information stored inside the data warehouse.
 The business query view − It is the view of the data from the viewpoint of the end-user.
Three-Tier Data Warehouse Architecture

Generally a data warehouses adopts a three-tier architecture. Following are the three tiers of the
data warehouse architecture.

 Bottom Tier − The bottom tier of the architecture is the data warehouse database server.
It is the relational database system. We use the back end tools and utilities to feed data
into the bottom tier. These back end tools and utilities perform the Extract, Clean, Load,
and refresh functions.
 Middle Tier − In the middle tier, we have the OLAP Server that can be implemented in
either of the following ways.
o By Relational OLAP (ROLAP), which is an extended relational database
management system. The ROLAP maps the operations on multidimensional data
to standard relational operations.
o By Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) model, which directly implements the
multidimensional data and operations.
 Top-Tier − This tier is the front-end client layer. This layer holds the query tools and
reporting tools, analysis tools and data mining tools.

The following diagram depicts the three-tier architecture of data warehouse –

Data Warehouse Models

From the perspective of data warehouse architecture, we have the following data warehouse
models −

 Virtual Warehouse
 Data mart
 Enterprise Warehouse

Virtual Warehouse

The view over an operational data warehouse is known as a virtual warehouse. It is easy to build
a virtual warehouse. Building a virtual warehouse requires excess capacity on operational
database servers.

Data Mart

Data mart contains a subset of organization-wide data. This subset of data is valuable to specific
groups of an organization.

In other words, we can claim that data marts contain data specific to a particular group. For
example, the marketing data mart may contain data related to items, customers, and sales. Data
marts are confined to subjects.

Points to remember about data marts −

 Window-based or Unix/Linux-based servers are used to implement data marts. They are
implemented on low-cost servers.
 The implementation data mart cycles is measured in short periods of time, i.e., in weeks
rather than months or years.
 The life cycle of a data mart may be complex in long run, if its planning and design are
not organization-wide.
 Data marts are small in size.
 Data marts are customized by department.
 The source of a data mart is departmentally structured data warehouse.
 Data mart are flexible.