Analytical processing still has to store the data it accesses in a specialized format within the Oracle database and this is an integral part of the Oracle OLAP implementation: data is composed of cubes containing the measures (the data) and whose ‘edges’ are the dimensions that define their levels and hierarchies.
The diagram below shows one cube that is defined by three dimensions, Time, Product and Customer, and the cells within the cube are the data values, (which are also known as measures). In the Figure, the dimensions have been simplified and only depict the lowest levels, for example the months on the Time dimension, but dimensions also incorporate hierarchies that define the grouping of the data. For example, that Months roll up to Quarters that roll up to Years.