OLAP cube

are derived from the dimension tables.

m
Ti

Products

2 Hierarchy

Cities

The elements of a dimension can be organized as a

hierarchy,[4] a set of parent-child relationships, typically
where a parent member summarizes its children. Parent
elements can further be aggregated as the children of another parent.[5]
For example May 2005s parent is Second Quarter 2005
which is in turn the child of Year 2005. Similarly cities
are the children of regions; products roll into product
groups and individual expense items into types of expenditure.

An example of an OLAP cube

An OLAP cube is an array of data understood in terms 3 Operations

of its 0 or more dimensions. OLAP is an acronym
for online analytical processing.[1] OLAP is a computer- Conceiving data as a cube with hierarchical dimensions
based technique for analyzing business data in the search leads to conceptually straightforward operations to facilifor business intelligence.[2]
tate analysis. Aligning the data content with a familiar visualization enhances analyst learning and productivity.[5]
The user-initiated process of navigating by calling for
1 Terminology
page displays interactively, through the specication of
slices via rotations and drill down/up is sometimes called
A cube can be considered a multi-dimensional general- slice and dice. Common operations include slice and
ization of a two- or three-dimensional spreadsheet. For dice, drill down, roll up, and pivot.
example, a company might wish to summarize nancial
data by product, by time-period, and by city to compare
actual and budget expenses. Product, time, city and scenario (actual and budget) are the datas dimensions.[3]
Cube is a shortcut for multidimensional dataset, given that
data can have an arbitrary number of dimensions. The
term hypercube is sometimes used, especially for data
with more than three dimensions.
OLAP slicing

Slicer is a term for a dimension which is held constant for all cells so that multidimensional information Slice is the act of picking a rectangular subset of a cube by
can be shown in a two dimensional physical space of a choosing a single value for one of its dimensions, creatspreadsheet or pivot table.
ing a new cube with one fewer dimension.[5] The picture
Each cell of the cube holds a number that represents some shows a slicing operation: The sales gures of all sales
measure of the business, such as sales, prots, expenses, regions and all product categories of the company in the
budget and forecast.
year 2004 are sliced out of the data cube.
OLAP data is typically stored in a star schema or
snowake schema in a relational data warehouse or in a
special-purpose data management system. Measures are
derived from the records in the fact table and dimensions

Dice: The dice operation produces a subcube by allowing the analyst to pick specic values of multiple
dimensions.[6] The picture shows a dicing operation: The
new cube shows the sales gures of a limited number of
1

5 SEE ALSO

4 Mathematical denition
In database theory, an OLAP cube is[8] an abstract representation of a projection of an RDBMS relation. Given
a relation of order N, consider a projection that subtends
X, Y, and Z as the key and W as the residual attribute.
Characterizing this as a function,
f : (X,Y,Z) W,
OLAP dicing

the attributes X, Y, and Z correspond to the axes of the

cube, while the W value into which each ( X, Y, Z ) triple
product categories, the time and region dimensions cover maps corresponds to the data element that populates each
the same range as before.
cell of the cube.
Insofar as two-dimensional output devices cannot readily characterize three dimensions, it is more practical to
project slices of the data cube (we say project in the classic vector analytic sense of dimensional reduction, not in
the SQL sense, although the two are conceptually similar),
g : (X,Y) W
OLAP Drill-up and drill-down

Drill Down/Up allows the user to navigate among levels

of data ranging from the most summarized (up) to the
most detailed (down).[5] The picture shows a drill-down
operation: The analyst moves from the summary category
Outdoor-Schutzausrstung to see the sales gures for
the individual products.

which may suppress a primary key, but still have some

semantic signicance, perhaps a slice of the triadic functional representation for a given Z value of interest.

The motivation[8] behind OLAP displays harks back to

the cross-tabbed report paradigm of 1980s DBMS. The
resulting spreadsheet-style display, where values of X
populate row $1; values of Y populate column $A; and
Roll-up: A roll-up involves summarizing the data along a values of g : ( X, Y ) W populate the individual cells
dimension. The summarization rule might be computing southeast of $B2, so to speak, $B2 itself included.
totals along a hierarchy or applying a set of formulas such
as prot = sales - expenses.[5]

5 See also
Comparison of OLAP Servers
Business intelligence
Data mining
Data Mining Extensions
OLAP pivoting

Data warehouse
Data mart

Pivot allows an analyst to rotate the cube in space to see

its various faces. For example, cities could be arranged
vertically and products horizontally while viewing data
for a particular quarter. Pivoting could replace products with time periods to see data across time for a single
product.[5][7]

Fast Analysis of Shared Multidimensional Information

The picture shows a pivoting operation: The whole cube

is rotated, giving another perspective on the data.

Online analytical processing (OLAP)

Pivot Table
Multidimensional Expressions (MDX)

XML for Analysis

References

[1] Just What Are Cubes Anyway? (A Painless Introduction

to OLAP Technology)". Msdn.microsoft.com. Retrieved
2012-07-25.
[2] Deepak Pareek (2007). Business Intelligence for Telecommunications. CRC Press. pp. 294 pp. ISBN 0-84938792-2. Retrieved 2008-03-18.
[3] Cybertec releases OLAP cubes for PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL. 2006-10-02. Retrieved 2008-03-05.
[4] Oracle9i Data Warehousing Guide hierarchy. Lorentz
Center. Retrieved 2008-03-05.
[5] OLAP and OLAP Server Denitions.
Council. 1995. Retrieved 2008-03-18.

The OLAP

[6] Glossary of Data Mining Terms. University of Alberta.

1999. Retrieved 2008-03-17.
[7] Computer Encyclopedia: multidimensional views. Answers.com. Retrieved 2008-03-05.
[8] Gray, Jim; Bosworth, Adam; Layman, Andrew; Priahesh,
Hamid (1995-11-18). Data Cube: A Relational Aggregation Operator Generalizing Group-By, Cross-Tab, and
Sub-Totals. Proc. 12th International Conference on Data
Engineering. IEEE. pp. 152159. Retrieved 2008-11-09.

External links
Daniel Lemire (December 2007). Data Warehousing and OLAP - A Research-Oriented Bibliography. Retrieved 2008-03-05.
The RDF Data Cube Vocabulary

8 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

8.1

Text

OLAP cube Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLAP%20cube?oldid=623296069 Contributors: Michael Hardy, Charles Matthews,

Urantian, SEWilco, Rohan Jayasekera, Jmabel, Goethean, Lysy, Sepreece, Vasile, Asqueella, S.K., Fenice, Aranel, John Vandenberg,
.:Ajvol:., Hooperbloob, Cma, Brycen, Kgrr, Gyrae, FluyPanda, MauriceKA, DePiep, Lockley, Jmcc150, Yorrose, EngineerScotty, Cvanhasselt, Crasshopper, Wizzard, Flagboy, Modify, SmackBot, Eskimbot, Ohnoitsjamie, Thumperward, Emurphy42, Sspecter, T-borg,
Wikiolap, Soumyasch, Robosh, Dll99, David Tristram, Quaeler, Bertport, OS2Warp, SqlPac, CmdrObot, Cydebot, Labreuer, LeoHeska, Astazi, Thijs!bot, Hazmat2, CharlesHoman, Lfstevens, Paulrho, Magioladitis, AndyReid, Animum, EagleFan, J.delanoy, McSly, Plasticup, Jrolston, Qseep, VolkovBot, Technopat, Mihirgokani007, Andy Dingley, SieBot, SouthLake, Hiddenfromview, ClueBot,
Niceguyedc, PasabaPorAqui, Yx7557, Addbot, Yobot, Ningauble, AnomieBOT, Materialscientist, Julianhyde, Osiris.toth138, NinjaCross,
Crysb, RjwilmsiBot, Igor Yalovecky, Carmichael, 28bot, ClueBot NG, Helpful Pixie Bot, Infopedian, Anubhab91, Krystof1000, BattyBot,
Monkbot and Anonymous: 103

8.2

Images

File:Edit-clear.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f2/Edit-clear.svg License: ? Contributors: The Tango! Desktop

Project. Original artist:
The people from the Tango! project. And according to the meta-data in the le, specically: Andreas Nilsson, and Jakub Steiner (although
minimally).
File:Internet_map_1024.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Internet_map_1024.jpg License: CC-BY2.5 Contributors: Originally from the English Wikipedia; description page is/was here. Original artist: The Opte Project
File:Merge-arrow.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Merge-arrow.svg License: Public domain Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:OLAP_Cube.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/OLAP_Cube.svg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0
OLAP_Cube.png <a href='//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OLAP_Cube.png' class='image'><img alt='OLAP
Contributors:
Cube.png'
src='//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7d/OLAP_Cube.png/50px-OLAP_Cube.png'
width='50'
height='43'
srcset='//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7d/OLAP_Cube.png/75px-OLAP_Cube.png
1.5x,
//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7d/OLAP_Cube.png/100px-OLAP_Cube.png 2x' data-le-width='280' datale-height='242' /></a>
Original artist: OLAP_Cube.png: Konrad Roeder
File:OLAP_dicing.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/OLAP_dicing.png License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: Own work Original artist: Infopedian
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Contributors: Own work Original artist: Infopedian
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File:Question_book-new.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/99/Question_book-new.svg License: ? Contributors:
Created from scratch in Adobe Illustrator. Based on Image:Question book.png created by User:Equazcion Original artist:
Tkgd2007

8.3

Content license

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