For example, Answers can publish portlets to an enterprise portal via the JSR
specification. An enterprise portal can also provide access to a number of other applications
and web sites through its interface, and it is highly customizable by users.
Other Software for the Data Warehouse | 245
OLAP and OLAP Applications Building
As business users become more sophisticated, their questions evolve from ???what
happened??? to ???what trends are present and what might happen in the future???? OLAP
tools provide the ability to handle time-series and mathematical analysis for understanding
past trends and forecasting the future.
OLAP initially grew around the early inability of relational databases to effectively
handle multidimensional queries (described previously in the section ???Data Warehouse
Design???). This led to OLAP tools packaged with their own data ???cubes??? where
data is downloaded from relational sources into the cubes.
These separate database engines are called Multidimensional Online Analytical Processing
engines, or MOLAP engines.
Pages:
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539