Analytic databases (a.k.a. OLAP- On Line Analytical Processing)
are primarily static,
read-only databases which store archived, historical data used
for analysis. For example, a company might store sales records
over the last ten years in an analytic database and use
that database to analyze marketing strategies in relationship
to demographics.
On the web, you will often see analytic
databases in the form of inventory catalogs such as the one
shown on the previous page from Amazon.com. An inventory
catalog analytical database usually holds descriptive
information about all available products in the inventory.
Web pages are generated dynamically
by querying the list of available products in the inventory
against some search parameters. The dynamically-generated
page will display the information about each item (such as title,
author, ISBN) which is stored in the database.
