The FASMI test

Our definition is designed to be short and easy to remember — 12 rules or 18 features are far too many for most people to carry in their heads; we are pleased that we were able to summarize the OLAP definition in just five key words: Fast Analysis of Shared Multidimensional Information — or, FASMI for short.

FAST means that the system is targeted to deliver most responses to users within about five seconds, with the simplest analyses taking no more than one second and very few taking more than 20 seconds. Independent research in The Netherlands has shown that end-users assume that a process has failed if results are not received with 30 seconds, and they are apt to hit ‘Alt+Ctrl+Delete’ unless the system warns them that the report will take longer. Even if they have been warned that it will take significantly longer, users are likely to get distracted and lose their chain of thought, so the quality of analysis suffers. This speed is not easy to achieve with large amounts of data, particularly if on-the-fly and ad hoc calculations are required. Vendors resort to a wide variety of techniques to achieve this goal, including specialized forms of data storage, extensive pre-calculations and specific hardware requirements, but we do not think any products are yet fully optimized, so we expect this to be an area of developing technology. In particular, the full pre-calculation approach fails with very large, sparse applications as the databases simply get too large (the database explosion problem), whereas doing everything on-the-fly is much too slow with large databases, even if exotic hardware is used. Even though it may seem miraculous at first if reports that previously took days now take only minutes, users soon get bored of waiting, and the project will be much less successful than if it had delivered a near instantaneous response, even at the cost of less detailed analysis. The OLAP Survey has found that slow query response is consistently the most often-cited technical problem with OLAP products, so too many deployments are clearly still failing to pass this test.

ANALYSIS means that the system can cope with any business logic and statistical analysis that is relevant for the application and the user, and keep it easy enough for the target user. Although some pre-programming may be needed, we do not think it acceptable if all application definitions have to be done using a professional 4GL. It is certainly necessary to allow the user to define new ad hoc calculations as part of the analysis and to report on the data in any desired way, without having to program, so we exclude products (like Oracle Discoverer) that do not allow adequate end-user oriented calculation flexibility. We do not mind whether this analysis is done in the vendor's own tools or in a linked external product such as a spreadsheet, simply that all the required analysis functionality be provided in an intuitive manner for the target users. This could include specific features like time series analysis, cost allocations, currency translation, goal seeking, ad hoc multidimensional structural changes, non-procedural modeling, exception alerting, data mining and other application dependent features. These capabilities differ widely between products, depending on their target markets.

SHARED means that the system implements all the security requirements for confidentiality (possibly down to cell level) and, if multiple write access is needed, concurrent update locking at an appropriate level. Not all applications need users to write data back, but for the growing number that do, the system should be able to handle multiple updates in a timely, secure manner. This is a major area of weakness in many OLAP products, which tend to assume that all OLAP applications will be read-only, with simplistic security controls. Even products with multi-user read-write often have crude security models; an example is Microsoft OLAP Services.

MULTIDIMENSIONAL is our key requirement. If we had to pick a one-word definition of OLAP, this is it. The system must provide a multidimensional conceptual view of the data, including full support for hierarchies and multiple hierarchies, as this is certainly the most logical way to analyze businesses and organizations. We are not setting up a specific minimum number of dimensions that must be handled as it is too application dependent and most products seem to have enough for their target markets. Again, we do not specify what underlying database technology should be used providing that the user gets a truly multidimensional conceptual view.

INFORMATION is all of the data and derived information needed, wherever it is and however much is relevant for the application. We are measuring the capacity of various products in terms of how much input data they can handle, not how many Gigabytes they take to store it. The capacities of the products differ greatly — the largest OLAP products can hold at least a thousand times as much data as the smallest. There are many considerations here, including data duplication, RAM required, disk space utilization, performance, integration with data warehouses and the like.


Source article: The FASMI test