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OLTP vs OLAP or Relational vs Dimensiona

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by intergrow

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Hello all you fine, smart TechReps,

I've recently run into OLAP/OLTP information and relational/Dimensional dB's. I am familiar with RDBMS but had never heard of DDBMS.

-Researching, I discovered time, multi-dimensions and hierarchical dimensions make up data cubes.
-As well I found some stat calculations from 'Incremental multidimensional scaling method for database visualization'
Wojciech Basalaj(University of Cambridge).
-And there are many vendors who offer OLAP databases.

I suspect that Multi-dimensional dB's are still tables, tuples, keys and domains just implimeted oddly.

What I would like to know is: what is a multidimensional databases from the point of view of a SQL coder and is there a normalization scheme for them.

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by trish_sutter

Relational VS Dimensional are different database architectures for different applications. Relational databases are designed for OLTP. Dimensional (data warehouses or datamarts) are design for OLAP or reporting.

The classic relational database uses normalization techniques to optimize for OLTP. In a nutshell, the data warehouse goes a step further to ususally a star schema for the purpose of optimizing OLAP and aggregate reporting. Essentially we denormalize to create a data mart.

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