CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powerbidata-warehousebusiness-intelligenceolapolap-cube
Chanfir
Chanfir

Reputation: 73

where is OLAP in powerBI

I am new to Business Inteligence and powerBI I understand the need of warehouses and dimension modeling

My question is once the datawarehouse is created (in my case using oracle) i can connect it to powerBI and start creating reports with the datasets imported from my warehouse

In this case what is the difference between the data imported in powerBI and the OLAP cubes , is it the same thing ? (does powerBI creates the cubes implicitly before beeing able to create reports for example)

For instance, I can have my datawarehouse created with usual sql and sgbd oracle (no multidimensional database , MDX or any other concept/technology) so I need to understand the utility of OLAP in this case

In case it is useful to use OLAP and or MDX , should we redesign the warehouse from scratch with other technologies or it is just a layer to add on top of oracle database?

Thank you

Upvotes: 1

Views: 7932

Answers (2)

André Pletschette
André Pletschette

Reputation: 302

The answer to your question is: Yes, PowerBI creates his own Olap cubes while importing data from external data sources. However this is different when using direct query, but to be honest direct query is not the right way to go for most cases.

Generally in PowerBI you can speak of Tabular OLAP (TOLAP).

Upvotes: 0

Deepshikha
Deepshikha

Reputation: 10274

Ques: The difference between the data imported in powerBI and the OLAP cubes , is it the same thing ? answer: NO.

  1. What's the need for OLAP cube when we have datawarehouse?

    The main purpose of a cube is to do the precalculations and store it in analysis (in general ssas) database. Instead of running the calculations in the rdbms or data warehouse we create a OLAP (or say a SSAS) cube. So to rephrase it output of the calculated formula get stored in cube. So center of the cube is a fact table and dimensions are faces of the cube. Now there are numerous advantages of creating a OLAP cube but on a high level it can be the understood as with cube we can avoid contention of resources while doing analysis with source system and that we can have data from different data sources for analytic processing (OLAP).

  2. What's the need for OLAP cube when we can directly import data in PowerBI from datawarehouse?

    As OLAP cube hold the precalculated data for each query in PowerBI there is a minimum latency.So OLAP offloads Relationships, Aggregations, Drill downs and business Logic from PowerBI and do them at cube level.

Upvotes: 4

Related Questions