The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube

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A definitive history of the rise of the OLAP cube, how it's affected our industry, and what comes after. Staff writer at Holistics. Enjoys Python, coffee, green tea, and cats. I'd love to talk to you about the future of business intelligence! One of the biggest shifts in data analytics over the past decade is the move away from building ‘data cubes’, or ‘OLAP cubes’, to running OLAP* workloads directly on columnar databases. (*OLAP means online analytical processing, but we’ll get into what that means in a bit). This is a huge change, especially if you’ve built your career in data analytics over the past three decades. It may seem bizarre to you that OLAP cubes — which were so dominant over the past 50 years of business intelligence — are going away. And you might be rightly skeptical of this shift to columnar databases. What are the tradeoffs? What are the costs? Is this move really as good as all the new vendors say that it is? And of course, there’s that voice at the back of your he

Business Intelligence Data Modeling The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube A definitive history of the rise of the OLAP cube, how it's affected our industry, and what comes after. January 30, 2020 · 22 min read · Cedric Chin One of the biggest shifts in data analytics over the past decade is the move away from building ‘data cubes’, or ‘OLAP cubes’, to running OLAP* workloads directly on columnar databases. (*OLAP means online analytical processing, but we’ll get into what that means in a bit). The decline of the OLAP cube is a huge change, especially if you’ve built your career in d

The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube

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