2009年2月23日星期一

Group Assignment: Post # 2

A
B

C



As the Grid shows, report A can help the company to find out the average price which people are easily to accept.
Also, we can see the price trend is moving downward. This may due to vigorous competition in the internet industry.
Report B shows the growth rate in different products in different country. The marketing department can base on this report to do different marketing strategic.
In report C, the company will know the most popular product in different country. This is the easiest way for buyer to merchandise the product in the next year.



Answer 3.
A growing business of a company brings lots of effects with it and huge amount of data that needs to be stored and tracked is one of them. So, in order to deal with this data, new and sophisticated methods of data processing are required and OLAP or as others say, "On Line Analytical Processing", is one of them.

OLAP stands for “On Line A
nalytical Processing is a class of software technology that allows managers, executives and analysts to gain insight into information that has been transmuted from raw data through different ways. For example, trend analysis, planning, simulating, and budgeting. What makes OLAP stand out is its ability to perform multi-dimensional calculations, thus allowing wide variety of reports.

As we all know, the number of marketing reports increase as the size of the business grows and this is where multi-dimensional calculations helps. OLAP services online demo is a configured database which exerts a multi-dimensional model. This model can intricate analytical queries with a rapid execution time. The main component of OLAP is the OLAP server which is a high capacity, multi-user manipulation engine designed to operate multi-dimensional data and it sits between a client and database management systems or DBMS. An OLAP server is designed to support fast extemporized information in any alignment and also designed for rapid calculations.
Following are some of the benefits of OLAP -

1. The main benefit of the OLAP is its steadiness in calculations. OLAP can handle large quantity and fast speed data transmission through its own server and supportive software.
2.Another benefit of OLAP is its consistency of calculations. Reports are always presented in a coherent prensentation through the OLAP server or software. All data and graphs can be easily followed through by company's executives adn analysts. This is especially helpful when comparing information from previous reports to information contained in new ones and projected future ones. "What if" scenarios are some of the most popular uses of OLAP software and are made eminently more possible by multidimensional processing.

3. Another benefit of multidimensional data presentation is that it allows a
manager to pull down data from an OLAP database in broad or specific terms. In other words, reporting can be as simple as comparing a few lines of data in one column of a spreadsheet or as complex as viewing all aspects of a mountain of data. Also, multidimensional presentation can create an understanding of relationships not previously realized. All of this, of course, can be done in the blink of an eye. (Reference from http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-olap.htm, http://www.tech-faq.com/olap.shtml)

1 則留言:

  1. Good to see your report screenshots ! Here are my comments:

    1) The report should be in GRID format rather than CHART format. You can change the first screen shot to show the GRID format.

    2) You should have a total of 3 dimensions in each OLAP report. Currently the two reports provided have less than 3 dimensions each.

    This means you are looking at the data from 3 different points of view. A possible combination might be sales revenue according to customer marital status, product category and month.

    3) For the insights that you can gain from this report, you may say that this can help the company find out which months of the year are the peak buying periods for married and single people.

    4) The benefits you've listed are valid ones. In case you have used any external references, please include the references in your post as well and enclose any directly copied statements with double quotation marks. It's also good to use your own words and apply your explanations directly to the usage of the sample reports created.

    Hope this helps !

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