4.7 OLAP Overlay – Multidimensional Analysis

Note: OLAP features are available only in Style Intelligence.

Style Studio provides a lightweight, logical mapping tool called OLAP overlay to allow direct “slice-and-dice” on ER schema data. The OLAP overlay is an optional component of a data model that provides flexible ways to dynamically group, aggregate, and display summary information.

An OLAP overlay defines attributes as measures and dimensions. Measures are numeric values that are additive in nature. For example, 'order sale amount' fits this definition because adding all 'order sale amounts' will give the 'sales total'. Bank account 'daily balance', on the other hand, is not additive because adding two days of a balance does not provide meaningful information. Therefore, account balance is considered semi-additive, because it can still be averaged for useful purposes.

Dimensions are the descriptive parameters for measures that can be used to filter and group. For example, 'purchase date', 'ship date', 'product' and 'sale location' are all possible dimensions for orders. Dimensions also often form natural hierarchies, i.e., a product belongs to a category. This allows business users to easily use different combinations of dimensions and measures to analyze performance.

The total collection of dimensions and measures represents a multidimensional data structure known as a data cube. Because of its organization into dimensions and measures, conceptually, the OLAP overlay can also be considered a star schema.

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