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On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Data Warehousing are decision support technologies. Their goal is to enable enterprises to gain competitive advantage by exploiting the ever-growing amount of data that is collected and stored in corporate databases and files for better and faster decision making. Over the past few years, these technologies have experienced explosive growth, both in the number of products and services offered, and in the extent of coverage in the trade press. Vendors, including all database companies, are paying increasing attention to all aspects of decision support.
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Chaudhuri et al. (1997) studied this question.