Overview

This chapter provides concepts and background to help you start the process of enabling your data warehouse for access by Oracle OLAP client applications. The OLAP API has special requirements that are discussed in this chapter. If you are developing a SQL application, you may still benefit from the discussion of OLAP concepts. Moreover, SQL applications can also be implemented to use OLAP Catalog metadata, like the OLAP API.

This chapter presumes that the relational data stores in your warehouse have already been generated. For this purpose, you may have used Oracle Warehouse Builder or some other Extraction Transformation Transport (ETT) tool. This chapter does not provide sufficient information for you to build a relational data warehouse of your own, or even to fully understand the issues involved in creating and maintaining the relational structures for storing warehouse data.