A cube in the context of Business Intelligence is a multidimensional representation of business facts that can be accessed quickly to provide specific information. (This can be accomplished by properly written queries in a relational database, but the overhead involved in processing the query, which may involve a large number of 'joins', is simply not efficient). While a relational model is more suited to OLTP, a different model is necessary for OLAP. Whereas highly normalized tables are a norm for OLTP, the model for OLAP does not require normalization. The SQL Server Analysis Services that supersedes the earlier versions is specifically meant for analyzing data in the archives or in OLTP databases to be retrieved and burnished to provide the 'Intelligence' by mining for facts hidden in the data.
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