{"id":12094,"date":"2009-11-27T16:15:14","date_gmt":"2009-11-27T15:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=1361"},"modified":"2009-11-27T16:15:14","modified_gmt":"2009-11-27T15:15:14","slug":"olap-is-dead-long-live-analytics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2009\/11\/olap-is-dead-long-live-analytics.html","title":{"rendered":"OLAP is Dead (Long Live Analytics)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"olap_is_dead_banner\"<\/p>\n

\"\"The term OLAP or Online Analytic Processing<\/a> was coined in 1993 by relational database technology pioneer Ted Codd<\/a> (my claim to fame: we went to the same high school, Poole Grammar<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The term was chosen to contrast with OLTP or online transaction processing<\/a>, and was prompted by some clever marketing folks at Essbase<\/a>, who wanted to promote their multidimensional database product. Codd was famous for his twelve rules<\/a> defining the relational model<\/a> and duly came up with twelve rules for analytic systems<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The term was quickly taken up by the rest of the industry, and spawned new definitions (Nigel Pendse\u2019s FASMI test<\/a>) and multiple variations (MOLAP<\/a>, HOLAP<\/a>, ROLAP<\/a>, Huey, Dewie and Louie<\/a>, etc.).<\/p>\n

Over time, these multiple definitions started muddying the meaning of the term (was it a technology? a user interface? an approach to analysis?), and Gartner<\/a> decreed that it was \u2018just\u2019 part of a larger market called business intelligence<\/a>. The result has been a long slow decline of the use of the term OLAP, as the Google Trends<\/a> chart below indicates.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

Only Nigel Pendse<\/a> of the OLAP Report tried to side-step this trend, and continued producing OLAP-specific analysis for many years, but \u201cbusiness intelligence\u201d was clearly the mainstream industry term. A few years ago, Nigel sold the OLAP Report to the German BARC group<\/a>, who initially continued under the same name, and tried vainly to convince everybody that OLAP was still a \u201chip term\u201d<\/a>, but finally succumbed to the inevitable and announced last month<\/a> that they would be changing the name of the report\/site to The BI Verdict<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(Sadly, at some point in this process, BARC decided to lock one of Nigel\u2019s best articles — \u201cHow not to buy a BI product\u201d \u2013 behind their subscription firewall. All I can find on the web is a far-less-entertaining summary of the main points here<\/a>. [UPDATE: thanks to a tip from Florian Bahr<\/a>, I can point you to the full article on the WayBackMachine: How not to buy an OLAP product<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Since BARC were the last group using the term with any frequency, it\u2019s now fairly safe to say that OLAP\u2019s days are over, but interestingly, the group seems to have chosen to shift to the wrong term. The chart below shows that the search trend for \u201cbusiness intelligence\u201d has been slowly drifting down over the last five years.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

And the decline is even more pronounced for another standard industry term, \u201cperformance management\u201d<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

Since BI and performance management remain fast-growing markets, this trend is a little surprising \u2013 until you look at the search figures for the term analytics<\/a>. Starting in 2005 (perhaps prompted by the introduction of Google Analytics<\/a>?), the term has skyrocketed in use.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

Possible reasons for this may include:<\/p>\n