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future will be able to plug in to the Web and manipulate financial objects as they move through a virtual city of data cubes. Because it contains summations, the data cube might become the primary storage mechanism for industries such as banking. Suppose that you want to wire funds to another bank. Your virtual teller would enable you to slice out the different cells of your data cube and "throw" them down virtual Main Street into your second bank.

OLAP of the Mind

With all the visual information that comes with an OLAP database, you are freed from seeing the world of business in only a textual way. Text was a good way of storing verbal information, such as religious writings or the plays of William Shakespeare; yet, as human beings, we don't think textually. When you walk into your yard, you don't see a mental Tree label when you are looking at a tree. In the same way, if you are viewing sums of financial information on a spreadsheet, you need to look at the numbers and then perform a translation in your mind regarding sizes and spaces, as well as your feelings toward these numbers and associations with their differences.

By displaying information graphically, such as summations of sales information related to each branch of your company, you can see things in a way that enable your mind to work on the problems of your business and not on the need to conceptualize the data from simple text. By viewing patterns that your mind can grasp quickly, you actually can use more of the graphical capabilities that make up your thinking process. By zooming in and out of data in a data cube, you can see patterns in data, and you don't need to be concerned with the textual ways in which data might have been stored or entered. Try this exercise yourself. Find some data in printed form and then in graphical form. The graphical form will be much easier to understand and should take less time to view.

OLAP and virtual reality will enable you to use more aspects of your mind when making decisions about the world. You will see patterns instantly that you never saw before in your data or had only suspected. You will be able to compare differences in business variables visually and not simply by looking at two numbers. Visual representations of data will be the brain food of the next millennium , and you will wonder how anything ever got done by using text as a form of information storage. Textual representations of data will be considered as ancient as writing on papyrus.

Summary

In this chapter you toured the Discoverer product offered by Oracle and must conclude that this product is a success. It makes the creation of an OLAP database easy, and it performs better reporting than any Oracle tool I have seen. The things you accomplished in this chapter were not trivial, and would have taken a long time to do manually even with a relational database and the SQL language.

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It is also refreshing to look at the new OLAP paradigm that you saw is the foundation of this product. Because Discoverer is linked in so well with the Oracle RDBMS, it does a lot of the maintenance that an OLAP system requires automatically and hides multidimensional database strategies from the OLAP administrator. This represents a savings in time over other similar products that would not interface to Oracle as well. I suspect the popularity of both Oracle's Discoverer and of OLAP analysis in general will grow quickly in the next few years .

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Part X

In This PART

• n Programmer/2000

Other Oracle Development Tools

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