[gfody]

people can really get hung up on jargon like this. the real concept is dimensional modeling which is a whole strategy and toolkit of ideas for doing online analytical processing. you can do it with anything, the data warehouse toolkit was calling it "rowlap" when you did in a regular database. you would be dead lost trying to use a proper "olap" tool with special sparse matrix data structures and MDX queries without understanding concepts like the various types of dimension tables and how they can be nested etc. Claire was basically right but maybe actually complaining more about the marketing of the olap products than any actual gatekeeping.