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Database Security: Hierarchy

 OLAP encourages more complex security scenarios, especially for ad hoc access. By comparison, it’s difficult to set up a relational database to protect detailed data (sales by sales rep), but provide more open access to summarized data (sales by region). This is especially true for ad hoc access on the relational side. Security is significantly more powerful on OLAP because of the semantics about parents and children inherent in the access languages.