Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a category of software that allows users to analyze information from multiple database systems at the same time. It is a technology that enables analysts to extract and view business data from different points of view.
Analysts frequently need to group, aggregate and join data. These OLAP operations in data mining are resource intensive. With OLAP data can be pre-calculated and pre-aggregated, making analysis faster.
Four types of analytical OLAP operations are:
- Roll-up
- Drill-down
- Slice and dice
- Pivot (rotate)