Supporting dimension updates in an OLAP server

Abstract

Commercial OLAP systems usually treat OLAP dimensions as static entities. In practice, dimension updates are often needed to adapt the warehouse to changing requirements. In earlier work, we defined a taxonomy for these dimension updates and a minimal set of operators to perform them. In this paper we present TSOLAP, an OLAP server supporting fully dynamic dimensions. TSOLAP conforms to the OLE DB for OLAP norm, so it can be used by any client application based on this norm, and can use as backend any conformant relational server. We incorporate dimension update support to MDX, Microsoft’s language for OLAP, and introduce TSShow, a visualization tool for dimensions and data cubes. Finally, we present the results of a real-life case study in the application of TSOLAP to a medium-sized medical center.