Wednesday, 5 September 2012

Business Analytics: Session 5&6_Group G



Today in our session we studied about a new function called OLAP Cube, it stands for Online Analysis Processing.

OLAP is software that is designed to allow users to navigate, retrieve and present business or organisational data.

Advantages of OLAP:

·         The data is stored in a ready reporting format. There is no need to write complex queries.
·         Fully interactive drag and drop sessions is usually provided too rather than having to write a complex report that might take several hours.
·         The data is categorized into dimensions and the software used is designed to work with numeric data where we can usually need to add up, consolidate or sum the data such as sales per quarter, sales per year per product.
·         Dimensions could be customers, products, regions, countries, and the time dimension e.g. weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. A solution usually has many dimensions usually three or more and could be termed multidimensional. 

OLAP Cube:

An OLAP cube is an array of data that is understood in terms of its 0 or more dimensions. The data has a different architecture from other forms of data storage.

There are two components – firstly the data built into a cube that houses the multidimensional data and secondly access tools to build and manipulate the data. The ability of OLAP cubes is to facilitate multifaceted data analysis in response to complex business queries; it maintains some degree of usefulness, as businesses accumulate increasingly large data volumes of increasing complexity. Since OLAP cubes can be made up of more than three dimensions (hypercube), in-depth analysis is enabled, allowing users to gain comprehensive and valuable business insights. Virtually unlimited numbers of dimensions can be added to the data structure (OLAP cube), allowing for detailed data analysis. The data sets can be viewed from different angles or pivots; a process if involving large data volumes, would take hours on a relational database.


A cube is a specialized data store designed to handle multidimensional data and the aggregated numerical data.                       


 Some of the features of OLAP Cube are:

·         Consolidation – we can roll up or sum the data to higher levels of abstraction e.g. local sales office, regional office, and national office and so on.
·         Drill Down – we can navigate down or up through the data with a few clicks.
·         Calculations – we can create derived calculations such as profit margins, yields etc.
·         Pivot tables – we can also readily view the data from different points or perspectives.

This is the analysis that what we did in class today. We divided the data among Summary variable and Grouping variable. And we got the following tables. In the OLAP Cube table by selecting different service provider, the gender, connection type, internet we get the mean of all the selected data.


                                                                            Case Processing Summary

 

 


Cases
Included
Excluded
Total
N
Percent
N
Percent
N
Percent
Usage period In Months  * Name of current service provider  * Connection Type * Internet * Same service used by my circle * Gender of respondent
206
100.0%
0
.0%
206
100.0%
Monthly expenditure on phone  * Name of current service provider  * Connection Type * Internet * Same service used by my circle * Gender of respondent
206
100.0%
0
.0%
206
100.0%


                                                                                              OLAP Cubes

Name of current service provider: Total
Connection Type: Total
Internet: Total
Same service used by my circle: Total
Gender of respondent: Total

Sum
N
Mean
Std. Deviation
% of Total Sum
% of Total N
Usage period In Months
2569
206
12.47
9.084
100.0%
100.0%
Monthly expenditure on phone
72633.00
206
352.5874
184.64170
100.0%
100.0%

By:
Annie Basumatary
11020841070
Group G

No comments:

Post a Comment