Acronym galore: OLAP and OPAL
We, IT people, have this horrible habit to use acronyms wherever and whenever we can. Up to a point where some acronyms have over 4 meanings. With a bit of luck, these have no overlap and are clear within context.
On other occasions, acronyms are only confusing to dyslectic or people like me who read diagonally and way to quick (don't know what's worse... but dyslectic people seem to be able to prove relativity theory!).
For a non-techie, both acronyms are "related to database type things". But they are fundamentally different and in following articles I'll go a bit more in-depth on the wonder world of OPAL (Oracle, Perl/PHP, Apache, Linux) and the world of OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) with some resources and thoughts on the underlying technologies.
