Writing to OLAP databases as well as reading from

[nickdaniels]

I've been doing a bit of background reading and was suprised to see that some OLAP products allow you to write to the database as well as read from.&nbsp;&nbsp;Is this purely for setting up summary information?&nbsp;&nbsp;I have a data warehouse background where, certainly in terms of the reporting front end the database is read only. <p> Nick<br><a href=mailto:ndaniels@ventura-uk.com>ndaniels@ventura-uk.com</a><br><a href= > </a><br>If it's Data Warehousing or related then I want to know - but post it to the forum!

 

[jnicho02]

You might include a fact table which has forecast figures. A manager may then want to change these on-screen and update the OLAP cube.<br><br>Alternatively, they may want to change some data temporarily for a 'what-if' scenario or because they know that a particular figure is incorrect (or to cook the books!). <p> <br><a href=mailto: > </a><br><a href=

http://www.geocities.com/jnicho02/>my

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[rhoesche]

Write back is usually used in applications that involve &quot;what if&quot; analysis. I have written an number of budgeting applications using Essbase one of the OLAP tools. As long as all the possible data points have been created ahead of time write back works nicely. It also allows imput of data by users. Excel is often the source for this data. MS OLAP requires a ROLAP partition to do this. This means you need Enterprise SQL server. If you are going to look at MS OLAP look at the beta SQL 2000 version it has a bunch of nice fixes. See the OLAPReport.com for more information.