Data in a data warehouse can be accessed using three general techniques:
- Reporting
- OLAP
- Data mining
Reporting is the simplest form of data access. A report is just a presentation of a query result in a tabular form. (Reporting is discussed in detail in Chapter 25.) With OLAP, you analyze data interactively; that is, it allows you to perform comparisons and calculations along any dimension in a data warehouse.
NOTE Transact-SQL supports all standardized functions and constructs in relation to SQL/OLAP. This topic will be discussed in detail in Chapter 24.
Data mining is used to explore and analyze large quantities of data in order to discover significant patterns. This discovery is not the only task of data mining: using this technique, you must be able to turn the existing data into information and turn the information into action. In other words, it is not enough to analyze data; you have to apply the results of data mining meaningfully and take action upon the given results. (Data mining, as the most complex of the three techniques, will not be covered in this introductory book.)
Source: Petkovic Dusan (2020), Microsoft SQL Server 2019: A Beginner’s Guide, Seventh Edition-McGraw-Hill Education.