Computing partial data cubes for parallel data warehousing applications

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on an approach to On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) that is based on a database operator and data structure called the datacube. The datacube is a relational operator that is used to construct all possible views of a given data set. Efficient algorithms for computing the entire datacube – both sequentially and in parallel – have recently been proposed. However, due to space and time constraints, the assumption that all 2d (where d = dimensions) views should be computed is often not valid in practice. As a result, algorithms for computing partial datacubes are required. In this paper, we describe a parallel algorithm for computing partial datacubes and provide preliminary experimental results based on an implementation in C and MPI.