Intro to OLAP: FASMI
The OLAP Report, one of the most internationally authoritative sources of information on OLAP products and applications, defines OLAP in five keywords: Fast Analysis of Shared Multidimensional Information, or FASMI for short.
| Fast |
The system is targeted to deliver most responses to users within about five seconds, with the simplest analyses taking no more than one second and very few taking more than 20 seconds. |
| Analysis |
The system can cope with any business logic and statistical analysis that is relevant for the application and the user, and keep it easy enough for the target user. |
| Shared |
The system implements all the security requirements for confidentiality and, if multiple write access is needed, concurrent update locking at an appropriate level. Not all applications need users to write data back, but for the growing number that do, the system should be able to handle multiple updates in a timely, secure manner. |
| Multidimensional |
The system must provide a multidimensional conceptual view of the data, including full support for hierarchies and multiple hierarchies. |
| Information |
The capacity of various products is measured in terms of how much input data they can handle, not how many gigabytes they take to store it. |
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