Before the era of big data, there was the era of business intelligence (BI). It was based on many of the same tenets, but focused more on formal data models and analysis of data at a summarized level.

Excerpt from Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Unleashed by Irina Gorbach, Alexander Berger, Edward Melomed Chapter 1: Introduction to OLAP and Its Role in Business Intelligence Excerpt from ...

Online analytical processing (OLAP) databases are purpose-built for handling analytical queries. Analytical queries run on online transaction-processing (OLTP) databases often take a long time to ...