Where is OLAP in Power BI

Question

I am new to Business Intelligence and Power BI I understand the need of warehouses and dimension modeling

My question is once the data warehouse is created (in my case using oracle) i can connect it to Power BI and start creating reports with the datasets imported from my warehouse

In this case what is the difference between the data imported in Power BI and the OLAP cubes , is it the same thing ? (does Power BI creates the cubes implicitly before being able to create reports for example)

For instance, I can have my data warehouse created with usual sql and sgbd oracle (no multidimensional database , MDX or any other concept/technology) so I need to understand the utility of OLAP in this case

In case it is useful to use OLAP and or MDX , should we redesign the warehouse from scratch with other technologies or it is just a layer to add on top of oracle database?

Answer 1

Is there a difference between the data loaded in Power BI and the data in OLAP cubes? NO is the answer.

When we have a data warehouse, why do we need an OLAP cube?

A cube's main purpose is to do precalculations and store the results in an analysis (in general, ssas) database. We generate an OLAP (or SSAS) cube instead of doing the calculations in the rdbms or data warehouse. As a result, the calculated formula's output is saved as a cube. As a result, the cube's core is a fact table, and the cube's dimensions are its faces.

There are various advantages to constructing an OLAP cube, but the most important ones are that we may prevent resource contention when doing analysis with the source system and that we can have data from multiple data sources for analytic processing (OLAP).

What's the use of an OLAP cube when we can import data from a data warehouse directly into PowerBI?

There is little delay because the OLAP cube stores the precalculated data for each query in PowerBI.

As a result, OLAP takes Relationships, Aggregations, Drill Downs, and Business Logic out of PowerBI and performs them at the cube level.

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