OLE DB for OLAP

Microsoft OLE DB for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a set of objects and interfaces that extends the ability of OLE DB to provide access to multidimensional data stores and enables users to perform sophisticated data analysis through fast, consistent, interactive access to a variety of possible views of the underlying information. OLAP applications typically handle huge volumes of complexly interrelated data.

As a freely published specification and a developing industry standard for multidimensional data access, OLE DB for OLAP allows independent software vendors and corporate application developers to depend on a single interface for consuming multidimensional data, regardless of the vendor or source. With this technology, OLAP applications can uniformly access both relational and nonrelational data stored in diverse information sources, regardless of location or type.

For programmers using ADO, Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (Multidimensional) (ADO MD) provides a simple interface to an OLE DB for OLAP provider.