ACRO.IT Acronym Directory

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a category of software technology that enables analysts, managers and executives to gain insight into data through fast, consistent, interactive access to a wide variety of possible views of information that has been transformed from raw data to reflect the real dimensionality of the enterprise as understood by the user. OLAP is computer processing that enables a user to easily and selectively extract and view data from different points-of-view. Whereas a relational database can be thought of as two-dimensional, a multidimensional database considers each data attribute (such as product, geographic sales region, and time period) as a separate "dimension". OLAP can be used for data mining or the discovery of previously undiscerned relationships between data items.