OP posts with inverted condition: “OLAP != OLAP Cube” is the actual title.<p>I’d hate to think there’s some merit to restating this inequality, but there probably is. Legions have been indoctrinated into thinking Microsoft’s OLAP defined OLAP, or that a product was only OLAP if it had a (usually over-simple) cube structuring.<p>You’d have to look past vendor-specific or academic data-structure-and-algorithm-specific treatments to see a bigger picture. Erik Thomsen worked to spread a larger idea in the 1990’s and 2000’s, if you find his OLAP Solutions books or his articles in journals from that time.<p>Myself, I see the cube limitations on data modelling (semantic modeling for analytics being an actual passion) as being liftable with technology not available in 1993 when “OLAP” was coined.