Glossary · Analytics

OLAP

Online Analytical Processing–a computing approach optimized for complex analytical queries across large datasets.

OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) is a category of software technology that enables analysts, managers, and executives to gain insight into data through fast, consistent, interactive access. OLAP is optimized for read-heavy analytical workloads involving aggregations, grouping, filtering, and calculations across multiple dimensions. This contrasts with OLTP (Online Transaction Processing), which is optimized for high-volume transactional operations like inserts and updates. OLAP systems typically use columnar storage (storing data by columns rather than rows) for efficient aggregation, and support operations like drill-down (more detail), roll-up (less detail), slice (filter one dimension), and dice (filter multiple dimensions).

Fig — every answer ships with the tables, rows and SQL behind it.