The article is generalizing, as such articles do. Necessarily so. There are always exceptions. It is unfortunate that when such articles appear the dominant res

The article is generalizing, as such articles do. Necessarily so. There are always exceptions. It is unfortunate that when such articles appear the dominant response is nitpicking or exception pointing (I'd say 80%+ of the comments thus far). In the overwhelming bulk of cases firms have a column store that they generate cubes from. OLAP is run against the cubes. Some put warehousing in between, though that changes little. Cubes are fundamentally a form of caching because historically it was prohibitive to do large-scale aggregations in real-time. With massive memory servers, and more importantly flash storage that improves aggregate performance at the enterprise scale by many magnitudes -- a million times faster analysis and aggregation is entirely possible -- that historic caching step becomes a hindrance and maintenance/timeliness issue. So it's discarded. That's all 100% true. It has happened in many orgs. Not all, of course. But as a general trend.