Fast and dynamic OLAP exploration using UDFs

ABSTRACT

OLAP is a set of database exploratory techniques to efficiently retrieve multiple sets of aggregations from a large dataset. Generally, these techniques have either involved the use of an external OLAP server or required the dataset to be exported to a specialized OLAP tool for more efficient processing. In this work, we show that OLAP techniques can be performed within a modern DBMS without external servers or the exporting of datasets, using standard SQL queries and UDFs. The main challenge of such approach is that SQL and UDFs are not as flexible as the C language to explore the OLAP lattice and therefore it is more difficult to develop optimizations. We compare three different ways of performing OLAP exploration: plain SQL queries, a UDF implementing a lattice structure, and a UDF programming the star cube structure. We demonstrate how such methods can be used to efficiently explore typical OLAP datasets.

REFERENCES

• 1: Surajit Chaudhuri , Umeshwar Dayal, An overview of data warehousing and OLAP technology, ACM SIGMOD Record, v.26 n.1, p.65-74, March 1997 [doi>10.1145/248603.248616]
• 2: Zhibo Chen , Carlos Ordonez, Efficient OLAP with UDFs, Proceeding of the ACM 11th international workshop on Data warehousing and OLAP, October 30-30, 2008, Napa Valley, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1458432.1458440]
• 3: C. Ordonez and Z. Chen. Evaluating statistical tests on OLAP cubes to compare degree of disease. IEEE TITB, 2009.
• 4: Dong Xin , Jiawei Han , Xiaolei Li , Benjamin W. Wah, Star-cubing: computing iceberg cubes by top-down and bottom-up integration, Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Very large data bases, p.476-487, September 09-12, 2003, Berlin, Germany

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.4 Systems
          Subjects: Relational databases

Additional Classification:
  E. Data
  E.1 DATA STRUCTURES

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation, Measurement

Keywords:
cube, olap, udf