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This article to share with you is about BI, OLAP, multidimensional analysis, CUBE is what relationship, Xiaobian think quite practical, so share to everyone to learn, I hope you can read this article after some harvest, not much to say, follow Xiaobian to see it.

These are words we hear a lot when building analytical apps, and these words are often confused, so let's sort them out.

BI

BI is the abbreviation of Business Intelligence, which refers to the process of using existing data for data analysis to guide business decisions. BI has broad and narrow sense points, broad sense BI refers to as long as the use of data and its analysis results for business decision-making behavior belongs to the category of BI; and narrow sense BI is mainly multidimensional analysis, in practical work, narrow sense BI is also more popular.

The famous beer and diaper story was once widely sung in the BI field. It is said that Walmart found that the sales of beer and diapers increased greatly at a certain time through data analysis. The reason was that fathers bought diapers for their children and also bought several cans of beer for themselves. Therefore, Walmart adjusted the placement of beer and diapers (also known as bundling sales) and achieved great success.

The truth of the story remains to be seen, but it is said that the chain is not Walmart, but Oscar Drugs, a pharmacy and convenience store mainly operating in the Midwest. The company started its data mining project in 1992 and is considered a pioneer in data mining. The project collected information from 25 stores and more than 12 million shopping carts. The data did find that between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., customers bought beer and diapers. Store management did express interest in the discovery. But in reality, there was no redesign of the merchandise, no bundling of beer and diapers. However, the company conservatively reinvented the sales process to put the right item in the right quantity at the right time.

We do not judge the authenticity of the story too deeply, but the data analysis methods used in the story do not belong to the category of BI, but data mining, which is more classified into the category of AI.

OLAP

OLAP is the abbreviation of On-Line analytical processing (On-Line Analytical Processing). In a broad sense, OLAP refers to data query analysis, such as reports, ad hoc queries, and multidimensional analysis.

A concept opposite to OLAP is OLTP(On-Line Transaction Processing) online transaction processing, which is what we usually call transaction system, such as OA, ERP, CRM, bank core transaction system all belong to OLTP category. The biggest difference between OLTP and OLAP is that OLTP produces data, while OLAP only uses the data produced by OLTP to analyze data and provide decision support for enterprise operations.

From a broad perspective, OLAP is more like a logical concept, used to refer to online query analysis, obviously OLAP belongs to the category of BI. Sometimes we equate OLAP with multidimensional analysis. In system construction, we often say that "OLAP products" actually refer to multidimensional analysis.

What is multidimensional analysis?

multidimensional analysis

Multidimensional analysis means that in analytical systems, users can summarize measures by dragging dimensions so that users can view data from different angles. If multidimensional analysis is similar to self-service report from the perspective of report, business personnel can perform dynamic report query based on a pre-prepared result set, and can perform operations such as slicing, drilling, rotation (row and column transformation), etc.

Now many times BI, OLAP and multidimensional analysis are called the same thing in a narrow sense, in fact, it refers to the products that realize multidimensional analysis. For example, we say BI products and OLAP products refer to multidimensional analysis.

CUBE

CUBE is also called data cube, which can be understood as a dataset. In multidimensional analysis, users need to drag and drop analysis based on a result set. This result set is CUBE. Multidimensional analysis performs query, slice, drill and other operations for CUBE.

From the above description, BI, OLAP, multidimensional analysis can basically draw an equal sign in a narrow sense, but in a broad sense, the category of BI is obviously larger, followed by OLAP, then multidimensional analysis, and CUBE belongs to the category of multidimensional analysis, so CUBE has the smallest scope. The relationship between the four can be expressed graphically as follows:

If we mention these words in our actual work, it is best to confirm that they are expressed in the same scope, otherwise it may lead to communication deviation and affect system construction.

The above is BI, OLAP, multidimensional analysis, CUBE is what relationship, Xiaobian believes that some knowledge points may be our daily work will see or use. I hope you can learn more from this article. For more details, please follow the industry information channel.

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