Is OLAP essentially for Large Enterprises

I have been exploring OLAP for a few days and I see that it is a great technology targeted at large enterprises for analysis of the information. It has also been stressed that OLAP data is maintained separately of the OLTP data and updated periodically.

But one of the features of OLAP is maintaining indexes to facilitate quick summing / Max over some dimensions of cubes. I need this feature even in the core database i.e. I want to maintain totals of trasactions over a period on day/month/year basis so that I can very quickly calculate the balances and sums on any given date. I feel that OLAP can help me do this but I could not find anywhere that OLAP may be used in this regard. Also, I feel if sums are maintained this way, It is possible for the RDBMS to execute nomal sum/avg/count queries very quickly taking the advantage of the sums etc. maintained in the cubes. I could not find any such mention in both SQL Server and Oracle documentation.

Please guide me about this.
Please also refer me some good resource where I can learn more.

Thanks in advance. Received on Sun Oct 28 2001 - 04:28:29 CST