OLAP (for online analytical processing) is software for performing multidimensional analysis at high speeds on large volumes of data from a [data warehouse](https://www.ibm.com/topics/data-warehouse "data-warehouse"), data mart, or some other unified, centralized data store. Most business data have multiple dimensions—multiple categories into which the data are broken down for presentation, tracking, or analysis. For example, sales figures might have several dimensions related to location (region, country, state/province, store), time (year, month, week, day), product (clothing, men/women/children, brand, type), and more. But in a data warehouse, data sets are stored in tables, each of which can organize data into just two of these dimensions at a time. OLAP extracts data from multiple relational data sets and reorganizes it into a multidimensional format that enables very fast processing and very insightful analysis.