The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube (2020)
"We model data according to rigorous frameworks like Kimball or Inmon because we must regularly construct OLAP cubes for our analyses."<p>Actually, no. We model our data this way so it can be used for business decisions.  It doesn't take long for any entity of any scale to discover that the logging and eventing done for heartbeat status, debugging, and scaling is just different than what you need to make a variety of business decisions.<p>You can solve with more events at different scales (button clicks nested in screen views) or pick events or event rolkups that appear to be clean business stages ("completed checkout") but still, your finance team, marketing group, all have different needs.<p>So, you decide to have some core shared metrics, derived and defined, and make them usable by everyone. Folks agree on the defns, and due to ease and trust, you see more data supporting more decisions.<p>You discover that some folks are doing 10 table joins to get an answer; it's fast but difficult to extend for new questions.  You decide to build a view that solves some of these pains, and refactoring to allow a better time dimension. Your version links with the metrics you created, and the resulting queries shed tons of CTEs while becoming readable to the average user.<p>And now, you have some ELT pipelines, some event transforms that result in counts and filters that map nicely to your business needs but still allow you to get atomic raws, and you and your teams start to trust in consistent results. Your metrics are mostly clearly summable, and ones that aren't are in table views that precalc the "daily uniques" or other metrics that may need a bit special handling.<p>You've started modeling your data.<p>No, we don't need olap cubes.  But we do need some type of rigor around analytic data.  Otherwise, why go to all the trouble to collect it, count it, and predict from it if it may be wrong with no measure of that uncertainty?<p>And yeah, Kimball et al are from a world where olap was the answr, but it turns out they solved a broader set of sql problems.  So, worth learning the good, toss the dated, and see what good data modeling can do for your analysis and predictions.