I am having an issue with a classmate and I'm not quite sure what went wrong. They gave a presentation (on OLAP) but I failed to understand whether there was anything distinctive about OLAP that separated it from regular DBs, besides the scale and potential visualisations. It seemed that everything discussed could be achieved through the use of comprehensive queries on a database, though the performance would be awful, and an attentive user, sprinkled with pretty visualisations. I feel I was misunderstood on two points, that I had a criticism of OLAP and the nature of multidimensionality with regard to a regular database.
I don't know enough about OLAP to criticise it or not. What I do have a is a question: what distinguishes it? And, I'm beginning to see how a focus on multidimensionality that exists in OLAP is absent (though possible) in a RDB.
Anyway, rather than making myself understood, I should I have opted to research it independently. However, I feel the classmate could have handled it more diplomatically theirself. Eventually, they decided that "we agree to disagree." That doesn't make much sense to me, as I never agreed to disagree, and I'm not sure what we would be disagreeing on. I don't dispute the arguments, I do want to know what makes OLAP different, though. Now I search.
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