Condensed cube: an effective approach to reducing data cube size

Abstract

Pre-computed data cube facilitates OLAP (on-line analytical processing). It is well-known that data cube computation is an expensive operation. While most algorithms have been devoted to optimizing memory management and reducing computation costs, less work has addressed a fundamental issue: the size of a data cube is huge when a large base relation with a large number of attributes is involved. In this paper, we propose a new concept, called a condensed data cube. The condensed cube is of much smaller size than a complete non-condensed cube. More importantly, it is a fully pre-computed cube without compression, and, hence, it requires neither decompression nor further aggregation when answering queries. Several algorithms for computing a condensed cube are proposed. Results of experiments on the effectiveness of condensed data cube are presented, using both synthetic and real-world data. The results indicate that the proposed condensed cube can reduce both the cube size and therefore its computation time.