This is the first of a series of posts about business intelligence tools, particularly OLAP (or online analytical processing) tools using MySQL and other free open source software. OLAP tools are a part of the larger topic of business intelligence, a topic that has not had a lot of coverage on MPB. Because of this, I am going to start out talking about these topics in general, rather than getting
![Intro to OLAP](https://cdn-ak-scissors.b.st-hatena.com/image/square/e35f74976bbb23b7e0e349df2861c4b3eb5547da/height=288;version=1;width=512/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.percona.com%2Fblog%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2010%2F07%2FPivottable-Flatdata.png)