[rstuart4133]

I remember hearing about OLAP cubes donkey's years ago (probably not far from 1993 as the article says), read numerous descriptions of what they are (many sounding like this article). But technically there was nothing novel about the results they were producing, any programmer could have done it. There was nothing surprising about the underlying data structures. I walked away with much of a clue, but it wasn't just marketing fluff because the idea kept hanging around.

That changed recently. I was asked to load some data into a OLAP package. Nothing special about that, but it meant I got to sit in on the training session for the people using it. They were the same people our IT had to help on a daily basis with the simplest of things. Yet within an hour it had clicked, and they were happily exploring how each dimension in many dimensional data effected the others.

That was my light bulb moment. The reason OLAP is still a thing 20 years later isn't because of some special algorithm, or data structure - it's because it's a unique GUI for exploring very complex data that non-computer find intuitive. That's my take on it anyway.