OLAP and comparison

Each type has certain benefits, although there is disagreement about the specifics of the benefits between providers.

Some MOLAP implementations are prone to database explosion. Database explosion is a phenomenon causing vast amounts of storage space to be used by MOLAP databases when certain common conditions are met: high number of dimensions, pre-calculated results and sparse multidimensional data. The typical mitigation technique for database explosion is not to materialize all the possible aggregation, but only the optimal subset of aggregations based on the desired performance vs. storage trade off.

MOLAP generally delivers better performance due to specialized indexing and storage optimizations. MOLAP also needs less storage space compared to ROLAP because the specialized storage typically includes compression techniques.

ROLAP is generally more scalable. However, large volume pre-processing is difficult to implement efficiently so it is frequently skipped. ROLAP query performance can therefore suffer.

Since ROLAP relies more on the database to perform calculations, it has more limitations in the specialized functions it can use.

HOLAP encompasses a range of solutions that attempt to mix the best of ROLAP and MOLAP. It can generally pre-process quickly, scale well, and offer good function support.