Online Analytical Processing - database systems optimized for complex queries and data analysis. Like a research library designed for deep investigation rather than quick lookups.
Business analysts use OLAP systems to analyze sales trends across different regions and time periods.
OLAP is an analytical workload pattern (complex aggregations over large datasets). These managed cloud data warehouses are commonly used to run OLAP-style queries at scale; they differ in architecture (e.g., MPP clusters vs. serverless) but serve similar analytics needs.