OLAP provides organizations with a means of accessing, viewing, and analyzing data with high flexibility and performance. First and foremost, OLAP presents data to end users through a natural and intuitive data model. Using this navigational style, end users can view and understand the information in their data warehouses more effectively, thereby allowing organizations to better recognize the value of their data.
Second, OLAP accelerates the delivery of information to end users viewing these multidimensional structures by preparing some computed values in the data in advance, rather than at execution time. The combination of easy navigation and fast performance allows end users to view and analyze data more quickly and efficiently than is possible with relational database technology only. The end result is more time spent analyzing data and less time analyzing databases.