OLAP - on-line analytical processing - is the foundation for a range of essential business applications, including sales and marketing analysis, planning, budgeting, statutory consolidation, profitability analysis, balanced scorecard and performance measurement.

Lazy Analytics™ adds OLAP capabilities to Sentences Version 3. It enables Sentences' users to manipulate, slice and dice data for analysis purposes, by applying analytical operations such as ratios, cumulative totals, trends and allocations across dimensions and across hierarchical levels, allowing users to make critical business decisions based on intelligent real-time reports without the need to develop a data warehouse. Pre-aggregation techniques are used to accelerate performance.

The product presents data to a wide range of visualisation tools, using Microsoft's OLE DB for OLAP interface for Windows clients, and the newer 'XML for Analysis' interface for browser-based and thin clients. The OLAP schema and structures are defined in Sentences itself. Additional functionality already slated for later releases includes support for virtual cubes, custom rollups and write-back.

Lack of support for vital technologies such as OLAP is a key weakness of XML and object-oriented databases alike.

Lazy Analytics is evidence of the growing strength of the Associative Model of Data and the functional breadth of Sentences.

Functionality scheduled for future releases includes:

• Virtual cubes
• Calculated members
• Custom rollups
• Write-back
• Member properties
• Unbalanced dimensions