Analyzing the sales and promotions of a given company and its competitors requires modeling complex relationships among the players. OLAP software must provide a rich tool kit of powerful yet succinct computational methods. Whereas transaction processing systems are judged on their ability to collect and manage data, analytical processing systems are judged on their ability to create information from data. The OLAP Council APB-1 performance benchmark contains a representative selection of calculations, both simple and complex. The computation of the forecast is the most complex calculation contained in the current version of the performance benchmark.
Historical data is used to project the future and aggregate data is used to estimate input data.
Other more complex calculations, such as allocations and trend analysis, are also often found in OLAP systems. Time Intelligence Time is an integral component of almost any analytical application. True OLAP systems understand the sequential nature of time. Business performance is almost always judged over time, for example, this month vs. last month, this month vs. the same month last year. The time hierarchy is not always used in the same manner as other hierarchies.