Flexible Data Cubes for Online Aggregation

Applications like Online Analytical Processing depend heavily on the ability to quickly summarize large amounts of information. Techniques were proposed recently that speed up aggregate range queries on MOLAP data cubes by storing pre-computed aggregates. These approaches try to handle data cubes of any dimensionality by dealing with all dimensions at the same time and treat the different dimensions uniformly. The algorithms are typically complex, and it is difficult to prove their correctness and to analyze their performance. We present a new technique to generate Iterative Data Cubes (IDC) that addresses these problems. The proposed approach provides a modular framework for combining one-dimensional aggregation techniques to create space-optimal high-dimensional data cubes. A large variety of cost tradeoffs for high-dimensional IDC can be generated, making it easy to find the right configuration based on the application requirements.