What is an OLAP Engine?
What is OLAP?
OLAP (or Online Analytical Processing) is a computational approach designed to enable rapid, multidimensional analysis of large volumes of data. With OLAP, data is typically organized into cubes instead of traditional two-dimensional tables, which can facilitate complex queries and data analysis in a way that is significantly more efficient and user-friendly for analytical tasks. In particular, OLAP databases can be especially well suited for BI use cases that require deep, multi-dimensional analysis or real-time / user-facing analytics and applications. Additionally, many modern OLAP databases are optimized to ingest large volumes of data, execute low-latency queries with high throughput, and process billions of rows quickly with an emphasis on speed and efficiency in data retrieval.
Unlike traditional relational databases or data warehouses that are optimized for transaction processing (with a focus on CRUD operations), OLAP databases are designed for query speed and complex analysis. Rather than storing data in a row-oriented manner, optimizing for transactional efficiency and operational queries, most OLAP databases are columnar and use pre-aggregated multidimensional cubes to speed up analytical queries. This allows a broad range of ad hoc queries and analysis to be performed without needing predefined schemas that are tailored to specific queries and it's this flexibility that enables the highly interactive slice-dicing and exploration of data that powers Rill dashboards. This paradigm allows OLAP to be particularly well-suited for organizations and teams that want to dive deep into and understand their data to support decision-making processes, where speed and flexibility in the actual data analysis are important.
Check here to see examples of use cases that can be powered by OLAP.
External OLAP tables
Rill supports creating and powering dashboards using existing tables from alternative OLAP engines that have been configured in a particular project. These tables are not managed by Rill, hence external, but allows users to bring in separate tables or datasets that might already exist in another preferred OLAP database of choice. This prevents the need of unnecessarily ingesting this data into Rill, especially if the table is already optimized for use by this other OLAP engine, and allows Rill to connect to the data directly (and submit analytical queries).
Supported OLAP Engines
Rill currently supports the following OLAP engines! Please refer to our Build Section for more information on the topic.
- DuckDB
- ClickHouse
- Druid
- Pinot
Our team is continually evaluating new OLAP engines to support. If you don't see an OLAP engine that you'd like to use, please don't hesitate to reach out. We'd love to hear from you!