One of the greatest benefits of multidimensional databases is their speed in answering queries that request highly aggregated information—for example, "What were the sales during the past three quarters for all products in Europe?" A traditional online transaction processing (OLTP) database might have to sum tens of thousands of individual transactions to answer this query. Multidimensional databases can respond quickly because they store or cache aggregated information about individual transactions, thus minimizing the amount of work necessary to respond to a query.

The...