Thank you for saying this! I think your definition of OLAP is good, but the definition of OLAP cube could simply be 'a data structure that is basically a very s

Thank you for saying this! I think your definition of OLAP is good, but the definition of OLAP cube could simply be 'a data structure that is basically a very sophisticated nested array'. I'm oversimplifying, of course — there are over four decades of work at this point on OLAP cubes, including various compression schemes (e.g. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-17569-5_74 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-17569-5_...) and other techniques to aggregate data when the cube outstrips the hosts's memory. But by and large it is important to understand that an OLAP cube is simply a data structure ... and different vendors have different implementations and optimisations of said data structure. I think this confusion exists because too many vendors conflate the two terms. They say OLAP when they mean OLAP cube. BigQuery and Redshift, however, do not: they are very clear that their dbs are designed for OLAP workloads but are not cubes.