As we've discussed elsewhere on this site, business intelligence data have a life-cycle like other parts of the business, beginning with capturing, then processing, consuming, and finally archiving the data. The computer systems associated with the first, or Capture phase of the life-cycle, are typically referred to as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems. These systems are usually designed, as we've noted, for getting data in rather than out.
OLTP systems were around for some time before anyone got the idea to dump data out of them and into a separate system for analysis purposes. Based on the notion of an OLTP system being one in which business data are captured as transactions, one would think that any system designed for data analysis should be designated as an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) system. Not so.
The OLAP acronym was, in fact, born in controversy. It was coined in the early 1990's by relational database pioneer Dr. E. F. Codd. Dr. Codd had been consulting for Arbor Software, who had just introduced a new multidimensional database engine called "Essbase." He published a paper outlining what an OLAP database should do, and lo! it said that an OLAP database should do what Essbase does! When it was later revealed that Dr. Codd had been a paid consultant for Arbor, he lost credibility in the IT industry. But the definition of OLAP had been established to mean a very specific type of database. Over the course of time, this definition has evolved somewhat.
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