If your needs are well-defined in advance, you are fine with a materialized view. What I mean by "needs" is, "What questions are you trying to answer?" OLAP's

If your needs are well-defined in advance, you are fine with a materialized view. What I mean by "needs" is, "What questions are you trying to answer?" OLAP's strength is that the platforms that implement it can precompute aggregations across all of your data and let you quickly answer questions that you might not have known you had.