HACKER Q&A
📣 acidity

Good starting point for OLAP/OLTP from RDBMS background


I have experience doing traditional web apps using PostgreSQL and some bit with SQL Server - back in 6.5 days.

Lately, I have been hearing about OLAP/OLTP/OLAP cubes etc at various meetings.

Doing a search does not seem to throw up a canonical reference on all these.

What would be a good way to go about learning these things with my background - which would be more traditional RDBMS based webapps/business apps.

  👤 quantified Accepted Answer ✓
There is no good canonical reference. OLAP for RDBMS is different than OLAP as originally defined and as provided in specialized tech stacks for purposes of planning apps, business modeling and so on. Absent a good canonical reference for what OLAP actually is, hard to have a good one for the RDBMS flavor.

The Data Warehousing Toolkit by Ralph Kimball is the classic for dimensional design in that vein.

I’ve been working in OLAP since 5 years before the term was coined, happy to discuss further.