Distributing the power of OLAP

In this paper we present the Brown Dwarf, a distributed system designed to efficiently store, query and update multidimensional data over an unstructured Peer-to-Peer overlay, without the use of any proprietary tool. Brown Dwarf manages to distribute a highly effective centralized structure among peers on-the-fly. Both point and aggregate queries are then naturally answered on-line through cooperating nodes that hold parts of a fully or partially materialized data cube. Updates are also performed on-line, eliminating the usually costly over-night process. Our initial evaluation on an actual testbed proves that Brown Dwarf manages to distribute the structure across the overlay nodes incurring only a small storage overhead compared to the centralized algorithm. Moreover, it accelerates cube creation up to 5 times and querying up to several tens of times by exploiting the capabilities of the available network nodes working in parallel.