I set out to discover what the current crop of business intelligence tools can do from their client-server side, and what capabilities they would have from a Web browser. I wanted to understand the impact of the Web on each tool, and under what circumstances to best deploy each kind of tool. The products I looked at for this review fall into three categories. Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay, and Brio Enterprise. Seagate Crystal Info.
Most data has many dimensions, such as time, number sold, segment of the company, etc.
Rarely will the first slice of data that users look at provide all the information necessary to answer the question. Traditional OLAP tools implement this by pulling the data from its native relational storage, summarizing it, and then putting it in a multidimensional database, or cube. The OLAP client then points at this cube.