In computing, a data warehouse, also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. Data warehouses are central repositories of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. They store current and historical data in one single place that are used for creating analytical reports for workers throughout the enterprise. This is beneficial for companies as it enables them to interrogate and draw insights from their data and make decisions.
Online analytical processing, or OLAP, is an approach to answer multi-dimensional analytical (MDA) queries swiftly in computing. OLAP is part of the broader category of business intelligence, which also encompasses relational databases, report writing and data mining. Typical applications of OLAP include business reporting for sales, marketing, management reporting, business process management (BPM), budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting and similar areas, with new applications emerging, such as agriculture.
ADO.NET is a data access technology from the Microsoft .NET Framework that provides communication between relational and non-relational systems through a common set of components. ADO.NET is a set of computer software components that programmers can use to access data and data services from a database. It is a part of the base class library that is included with the Microsoft .NET Framework. It is commonly used by programmers to access and modify data stored in relational database systems, though it can also access data in non-relational data sources. ADO.NET is sometimes considered an evolution of ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) technology, but was changed so extensively that it can be considered an entirely new product.
Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is an online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining tool in Microsoft SQL Server. SSAS is used as a tool by organizations to analyze and make sense of information possibly spread out across multiple databases, or in disparate tables or files. Microsoft has included a number of services in SQL Server related to business intelligence and data warehousing. These services include Integration Services, Reporting Services and Analysis Services. Analysis Services includes a group of OLAP and data mining capabilities and comes in two flavors multidimensional and tabular, where the difference between the two is how the data is presented. In a tabular model, the information is arranged in two-dimensional tables which can thus be more readable for a human. A multidimensional model can contain information with many degrees of freedom, and must be unfolded to increase readability by a human.
Business intelligence software is a type of application software designed to retrieve, analyze, transform and report data for business intelligence. The applications generally read data that has been previously stored, often - though not necessarily - in a data warehouse or data mart.
The Oracle Database OLAP Option implements On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) within an Oracle database environment. Oracle Corporation markets the Oracle Database OLAP Option as an extra-cost option to supplement the "Enterprise Edition" of its database.
Scriptella is an open source ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) and script execution tool written in Java. It allows the use of SQL or another scripting language suitable for the data source to perform required transformations. Scriptella does not offer any graphical user interface.
Palo is a memory resident multidimensional database server and typically used as a business intelligence tool for controlling and budgeting purposes with spreadsheet software acting as the user interface. Beyond the multidimensional data concept, Palo enables multiple users to share one centralised data storage.
Entity Framework (EF) is an open source object–relational mapping (ORM) framework for ADO.NET. It was originally shipped as an integral part of .NET Framework, however starting with Entity Framework version 6.0 it has been delivered separately from the .NET Framework.
Microsoft SQL Server is a proprietary relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which may run either on the same computer or on another computer across a network. Microsoft markets at least a dozen different editions of Microsoft SQL Server, aimed at different audiences and for workloads ranging from small single-machine applications to large Internet-facing applications with many concurrent users.
HBase is an open-source non-relational distributed database modeled after Google's Bigtable and written in Java. It is developed as part of Apache Software Foundation's Apache Hadoop project and runs on top of HDFS or Alluxio, providing Bigtable-like capabilities for Hadoop. That is, it provides a fault-tolerant way of storing large quantities of sparse data.
Exasol is an analytics database management software company. Its product is called Exasol, an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of online analytical processing (OLAP) servers. Please see the individual products articles for further information.
Pentaho is business intelligence (BI) software that provides data integration, OLAP services, reporting, information dashboards, data mining and extract, transform, load (ETL) capabilities. Its headquarters are in Orlando, Florida. Pentaho was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems in 2015 and in 2017 became part of Hitachi Vantara.
SQLstream is a distributed, SQL standards-compliant plus Java stream processing platform. SQLstream, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California and was launched in 2009 by Damian Black, Edan Kabatchnik and Julian Hyde, author of the open source Mondrian Relational OLAP Server Engine.
The following is provided as an overview of and topical guide to databases:
Hue is an open-source SQL Cloud Editor, licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service offered by Microsoft. It is designed to provide high availability, scalability, and low-latency access to data for mission-critical applications. Unlike traditional relational databases, Cosmos DB is a NoSQL database, which means it can handle unstructured and semi-structured, in addition to structured, data types.
ClickHouse is an open-source column-oriented DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that allows users to generate analytical reports using SQL queries in real-time. ClickHouse Inc. is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with the subsidiary, ClickHouse B.V., based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
RavenDB is an open-source fully ACID document-oriented database written in C#, developed by Hibernating Rhinos Ltd. It is cross-platform, supported on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. RavenDB stores data as JSON documents and can be deployed in distributed clusters with master-master replication.
