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Aloka Ranasinghe RAACD161

Week 8 Lab AA
Readings: Kroenke Text Book (Experiencing MIS), Chapter 9 & Chapter Extension 4
Jenny knows a lot of people in the fashion business. She’s been talking with her friend, Sam who runs a
chain of exclusive boutiques in Victoria.
Beauty First (BF) is a chain of boutiques across Victoria owned by Sam Moni. BF boutiques are
one of the most expensive women’s boutiques. Sam is particular about the quality of his staff,
designer cloths and fashion accessories. BF has many repeat customers and Sam himself is a well-
known fashion critique, often booked by fashion magazines for photo shoots or new brides who
want to look their best on their wedding day, hiring temporary staff for such occasions. Each BF
boutique employs a manager, a cashier/receptionist, 4 experienced designers for custom made items,
2 senior staff to work at the boutiques, 2 junior staff, and 2 casual staff.
Jenny and Sam have been discussing how to get better-quality information from their data. Sam tells
Jenny about OLAP and PIVOT tables.
b. If you were Sam, how would you use OLAP and the PIVOT table? Give examples of the
kind of information that Sam could create? How would this information be useful?

PivotTables, which are a great way to summarize, analyze, explore, and present data. Pivot tables are
also useful for quickly creating unweight cross tabulations. The user sets up and changes the
summary's structure by dragging fields graphically. This "rotation" or pivoting of the summary table
gives the concept its name.

A pivot table is especially useful with large amounts of data. A pivot table would allow sam to quickly
reorganize the data and create a summary for each item for the quarter in question.

For example, sam might list monthly sales totals for a large number of merchandise items in an Excel
spreadsheet. If sam wanted to know which items sold better in a particular financial quarter, it would
be very time-consuming for him to look through pages and pages of figures to find the information. A
pivot table would allow the owner to quickly reorganize the data and create a summary for each item
for the quarter in question.

c. Jenny likes this idea. Sam is happy for Jenny to use his PIVOT table as a model for
Camelot Boutique. How could Jenny adapt this model to her business? Give examples of:
i. the changes Jenny would need to make to the model.

Having mapped out the original business question in terms of dimensions, levels, and measures, Jenny
is ready to create and process the OLAP cube.
After Jenny have processed the cube, they can view the OLAP data in a PivotTable inside Microsoft
Dynamics AX or in Excel and thereby get the answers to the original business question.

ii. reports that Jenny could create from her OLAP model.

MOLAP Reports: In this type of OLAP, a cube is aggregated from the relational data source
(data warehouse). When user generates a report request, the MOLAP tool can generate the
results quickly because all data is already pre-aggregated within the cube.

ROLAP Reports: In this type of OLAP, instead of pre-aggregating everything into a cube, the
ROLAP engine essentially acts as a smart SQL generator. The ROLAP tool typically comes
with a 'Designer' piece, where the data warehouse administrator can specify the relationship
between the relational tables, as well as how dimensions, attributes, and hierarchies map to
the underlying database tables.

 Administration reports

 Inventory management reports

 General ledger reports

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