OLAP Operations

• Data is organized in multidimensional

model as multi dimension and each
dimension contain multiple level of
abstraction.
• OLAP provide user friendly environment
for interactive data analysis

The following table represents the 2-D view of Sales Data for a
company with respect to time, item, and location dimensions.

1
 3-D table can be represented as 3-D data
cube

Multidimensional Modeling
• Example: compute total sales volume per
product and store
Store
Total Product
Sales 1 2 3 4
1 $454 - - $925 800
2 $468 $800 - -
Store

3 $296 - $240 -
4 $652 - $540 $745
Product

2
 Multidimensional View
BPL
IND
RAI
BIL

Q1 605 825 14 400

Time(quarter)

Q2

Q3

Q4

H C P S
Items

Example
roll-up to region
Dimensions:
NY
SF
Time, Product, Store
roll-up to brand
LA
Attributes:
Product (upc, price, …)
Juice 10
Store …
Product

Milk 34
56
…
Coke
32 Hierarchies:
Cream
Soap 12 Product → Brand → …
Bread 56 roll-up to week Day → Week → Quarter
M T W Th F S S Store → Region → Country
Time
56 units of bread sold in LA on M

3
• The slice operation selects one particular
dimension from a given cube and provides
a new sub-cube.

SLICE
• Perform selection on one dimension
• Slicetime=‘Q1’ C [quarter,city,item] =
C[city,item]
BPL
Location(cities)

IND

RAI

BIL 605 825 14 400

H C P S
Item

4
• Dice selects two or more dimensions from
a given cube and provides a new sub-
cube.

DICE
• Reduce the data into two or more
dimension
• Dice for(location=“BIL” or “RAI”)&
(time=‘Q1’or‘Q2’)&(Item=‘H’or‘C’)
C(quarter,city,prodouct)

RAI
BIL

Q1

Q2
H C

5
 PIVOT
• Visualization operation.
• Provide alternative representation.
• Rotating the axis of cube.
• Transform the 3D cube into the series of
2D plane.

Pivot also called Rotation

6
 Pivoting
Fact table view: Multi-dimensional cube:
sale prodId storeId date amt
p1 c1 1 12
p2 c1 1 11 c1 c2 c3
p1 c3 1 50 day 2
p1 44 4
p2 c2 1 8 p2 c1 c2 c3
p1 c1 2 44 day 1
p1 12 50
p1 c2 2 4 p2 11 8

c1 c2 c3
p1 56 4 50
p2 11 8

PIVOT

605
H
825
C
Item

14
P
400
S

Bpl Ind Rai Bil

Location

7
 Common OLAP Operations
• Roll-up: move up the
hierarchy PRODUCT LOCATION TIME
– e.g given total sales category region year
per city, we can roll-up
to get sales per state product country quarter

state month week

• Drill-down: move
down the hierarchy city day
– more fine-grained
store
aggregation
– lowest level can be the
detail records (drill-
through)

Common OLAP Operations

• Drilling down/Roll down -Towards your
kids
– Aggregate to more detail level within the same
classification hierarchy
– Stepping down a dimension hierarchy
– Introducing addition dimension

• Drilling Up / Roll up -Towards your parents

– Detail to aggregate level
– Climbing up the dimension hierarchy
– Dimension reduction

8
 Roll Up/ Drilling UP

Drilling Up / Roll up
MP
CH
Q1
Time(quarter)

Q2

Q3

Q4
H C P S
Item

9
 Drilling Down

BPL
IND
RAI
BIL

Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
Drilling down/Roll down
May
June
July
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec

H C P S

10
11
12
13
14
Drill across
• Execute query involve ( across ) query in
more than one fact table
• It means switching from a classification in
one-dimension to different classification in
different dimension.
• Accesses more than one fact table that is
linked by common dimensions.
• Combines cubes that share one or more
dimensions.

Drill across
• For example, we are doing the sales revenue
analysis and have been able to find out the best
and least performing offices.
• However, to have a further understanding of the
picture, we now move across measures to find
out about the Sales transactions of these offices
– (a low revenue , but higher sales transaction point to
a certain level of activity) and number of sales staff
(the low performing offices could have lesser staff)
and number of months since the office is set-up (the
new offices being in gestation period could be
performing lower

15
 Drill through
• Drill through – operation make use of
relational SQL facilities to drilling through
the bottom level of a data cube down to its
back end relational table.
• Because transactional data is not
contained within the OLAP cube(ROLAP),
the manager needs a mechanism to
present the underlying transactions

Drill through
• The enterprise often needs to be able to see the
underlying transactions once he or she identifies
a summary that raises questions .
• Drill through, allows the property manager to
see the transactions that make up the margins,
exposing, for example, the tenants, vendors,
services, and other entities involved within each,
so that focused action can be taken to ultimately
control results

16
 OLAP vs Data Mining
• The main difference between OLAP and
data mining is how they operate on the
data
• OLAP ( Addition)
• Data mining ( Division)

OLAP vs Data Mining

• OLAP tools provide multidimensional data
analysis--that is, they allow data to be
broken down and summarized (such as by
regional sales).
• For example, OLAP typically involves the
summation of multiple databases into
highly complex tables.
• OLAP tools deal with aggregates--OLAP
technology basically comes down to the
operation of data via addition

17
 OLAP vs Data Mining
• For example, OLAP can tell you about the
total number of items sold in all the ZIP
codes in the country.
• OLAP is implemented in a multi-user
environment and offers consistent, quick
response, regardless of the volume of data

OLAP vs Data Mining

• Online analytical processing (OLAP) allows for
the analysis of this persistent historical
information across many dimensions. Typical
dimensions are who, what, when and where
• An OLAP tool can assist the user in constructing
and issuing a very complex multidimensional
query such as "what were the sales of paper
goods to females age 35-50 in the Northeast in
November and December?" These types of
queries are user driven with an objective of
proving or disproving a hunch or hypothesis

18
 OLAP vs Data Mining
Data mining, on the other hand, is about ratios,
patterns and influences in a data set. As such,
data mining is division. Data mining can tell you
about the factors influencing the sales of the
items in those ZIP codes.
Gartner has defined data mining as "the process
of discovering meaningful new correlations,
patterns and trends by sifting through large
amounts of data stored in repositories, using
pattern recognition technologies as well as
statistical and mathematical techniques

OLAP vs Data Mining

• A knowledge discovery process of extracting
previously unknown, actionable information from
very large databases."
• This is not to say that both OLAP and data
mining should not be used in conjunction to gain
a powerful insight into your company databases,
customer information file, data marts and data
warehouse. In fact, aggregate and inductive
analyses can complement each other

19
 OLAP vs Data Mining
For example, a data mining analysis can
discover a significant relationship in a set
of attributes.
OLAP can then expand on this and
generate a report detailing the impact of
the discovery

20