Fundamentals of Business Intelligence (FBI) Practice Exam

OLAP, which stands for Online Analytical Processing, is primarily used within Business Intelligence for analyzing multidimensional data interactively. This involves enabling users to perform complex calculations, trend analysis, and sophisticated data modeling across various dimensions such as time, geography, and product categories.

The essence of OLAP is to provide a fast and efficient way for end users to dissect and view data from multiple perspectives, making it particularly useful for reporting and data analysis purposes. By leveraging multidimensional data structures, OLAP allows users to understand relationships and patterns in their data that are not easily discerned in traditional, two-dimensional data representations.

While communication of data results and application building are important in the realm of Business Intelligence, they are not the primary focus of OLAP. Similarly, storing raw data pertains more to database management systems rather than the analytical capabilities that OLAP provides. Thus, the interaction and analysis of multidimensional data lie at the heart of OLAP's function within Business Intelligence frameworks.