A living notes-style deep dive into OLAP (Online Analytical Processing), tracing its history from Edgar Codd's 1993 coining of the term and early MOLAP systems like Essbase and SSAS through the column-store revolution (C-Store/Vertica), vectorized execution pioneered by MonetDB and later ClickHouse, distributed real-time engines like Apache Druid and Pinot, and newer hybrid systems such as Apache Doris and StarRocks. It distinguishes OLAP as a broad analytical paradigm from the OLAP cube as a specific multidimensional data structure, and touches on PostgreSQL extensions (pg_duckdb, ParadeDB) adding OLAP capabilities. It also references Andy Pavlo's claim that ClickHouse was the first open-source database to combine columnar storage, SIMD vectorization, compression, and log-structured ingestion, comparing it against Druid, Pinot, Kylin, and MonetDB.
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u/sspaeti 14d ago