Data Warehouses

and OLAP

*Slides by Nikos Mamoulis

 Multi-Tiered Architecture

Monitor
& OLAP Server
other Metadata
source Integrator
s Analysis
Operational Extract Query
Transform Data Serve Reports
DBs Load
Refresh
Warehouse Data mining

Data Marts

Data Sources Data Storage OLAP Engine Front-End Tools

 OLAP Server Architectures
Relational OLAP (ROLAP)
Use relational or extended-relational DBMS to store and manage
warehouse data and OLAP middle ware to support missing pieces
Include optimization of DBMS backend, implementation of
aggregation navigation logic, and additional tools and services
greater scalability
Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP)
Array-based multidimensional storage engine (sparse matrix
techniques)
fast indexing to pre-computed summarized data
Hybrid OLAP (HOLAP)
User flexibility, e.g., low level: relational, high-level: array
Specialized SQL servers
specialized support for SQL queries over star/snowflake schemas
 Data Warehousing and
OLAP Technology for
Data
What Mining
is a data warehouse?

A multi-dimensional data model

Data warehouse architecture

Data warehouse implementation

Further development of data cube technology

From data warehousing to data mining

Efficient Data Cube
Computation
Data cube can be viewed as a lattice of cuboids
The bottom-most cuboid is the base cuboid
The top-most cuboid (apex) contains only one cell
How many cuboids in an n-dimensional cube with L
levels? n
T ( Li 1)
i 1
Materialization of data cube
Materialize every (cuboid) (full materialization), none (no
materialization), or some (partial materialization)
Selection of which cuboids to materialize
Based on size, sharing, access frequency, etc.
Cube Operations
Cube definition and computation in DMQL
define cube sales[item, city, year]: sum(sales_in_dollars)
compute cube sales
Transform it into a SQL-like language (with a new operator
cube by, introduced by Gray et al.96)
()
SELECT item, city, year, SUM (amount)
FROM SALES
CUBE BY item, city, year (city) (item) (year)
Need compute the following Group-Bys
(date, product, customer),
(date,product),(date, customer), (product,
(city, item) customer),
(city, year) (item, year)
(date), (product), (customer)
()
(city, item, year)
Cube Computation: ROLAP-
Based Method
Efficient cube computation methods
ROLAP-based cubing algorithms (Agarwal et al96)
Array-based cubing algorithm (Zhao et al97)
Bottom-up computation method (Bayer & Ramarkrishnan99)
ROLAP-based cubing algorithms
Sorting, hashing, and grouping operations are applied to the
dimension attributes in order to reorder and cluster related
tuples
Grouping is performed on some sub-aggregates as a partial
grouping step
Aggregates may be computed from previously computed
aggregates, rather than from the base fact table
 Multi-way Array
Aggregation for Cube

Computation
Partition arrays into chunks (a small subcube which fits in memory).
Compressed sparse array addressing: (chunk_id, offset)
Compute aggregates in multiway by visiting cube cells in the order
which minimizes the # of times to visit each cell, and reduces
memory access and storage cost.

C c3 61
c2 45
62 63 64
46 47 48
c1 29 30 31 32 What is the best
c0
b3 B13 14 15 16 60 traversing order
44
9
28 56 to do multi-way
b2
B 40
24 52 aggregation?
b1 5 36
20
b0 1 2 3 4
a0 a1 a2 a3
A
Multi-way Array
Aggregation for Cube
Computation
C c3 61
c2 45
62 63 64
46 47 48
c1 29 30 31 32
c0
B13 14 15 16 60
b3 44
B 28 56
b2 9
40
24 52
b1 5
36
20
b0 1 2 3 4
a0 a1 a2 a3
A
Multi-way Array
Aggregation for Cube
Computation
C c3 61
c2 45
62 63 64
46 47 48
c1 29 30 31 32
c0
B13 14 15 16 60
b3 44
B 28 56
b2 9
40
24 52
b1 5
36
20
b0 1 2 3 4
a0 a1 a2 a3
A
 Multi-Way Array
Aggregation for Cube
Computation (Cont.)
Method: the planes should be sorted and
computed according to their size in ascending
order.
See the details of Example 4.4
Idea: keep the smallest plane in the main memory,
fetch and compute only one chunk at a time for the
largest plane
Limitation of the method: works well only for a
small number of dimensions
If there are a large number of dimensions, bottom-up
computation and iceberg cube computation methods
can be explored
 Indexing OLAP Data:
Bitmap Index
Index on a particular column
Each value in the column has a bit vector: bit-op is fast
The length of the bit vector: # of records in the base table
The i-th bit is set if the i-th row of the base table has the
value for the indexed column
not suitable for high cardinality domains

Base table Index on Region Index on Type

Cust Region Type RecIDAsia Europe America RecID Retail Dealer
C1 Asia Retail 1 1 0 0 1 1 0
C2 Europe Dealer 2 0 1 0 2 0 1
C3 Asia Dealer 3 1 0 0 3 0 1
C4 America Retail 4 0 0 1 4 1 0
C5 Europe Dealer 5 0 1 0 5 0 1
 Indexing OLAP Data: Join
Indices
Join index: JI(R-id, S-id) where R (R-id, )
S (S-id, )
Traditional indices map the values to a list
of record ids
It materializes relational join in JI file and
speeds up relational join a rather costly
operation
In data warehouses, join index relates the
values of the dimensions of a start schema
to rows in the fact table.
E.g. fact table: Sales and two dimensions
city and product
A join index on city maintains for each
distinct city a list of R-IDs of the tuples
recording the Sales in the city
Join indices can span multiple dimensions
 Efficient Processing OLAP
Queries
Determine which operations should be performed
on the available cuboids:
transform drill, roll, etc. into corresponding SQL and/or
OLAP operations, e.g, dice = selection + projection

Determine to which materialized cuboid(s) the

relevant operations should be applied.
Exploring indexing structures and compressed vs.
dense array structures in MOLAP
Metadata Repository
Meta data is the data defining warehouse objects. It has the
following kinds
Description of the structure of the warehouse
schema, view, dimensions, hierarchies, derived data defn, data mart
locations and contents
Operational meta-data
data lineage (history of migrated data and transformation path),
currency of data (active, archived, or purged), monitoring information
(warehouse usage statistics, error reports, audit trails)
The algorithms used for summarization
The mapping from operational environment to the data
warehouse
Data related to system performance
warehouse schema, view and derived data definitions
Business data
business terms and definitions, ownership of data, charging policies
Data Warehouse Back-End
Tools and Utilities
Data extraction:
get data from multiple, heterogeneous, and external
sources
Data cleaning:
detect errors in the data and rectify them when possible
Data transformation:
convert data from legacy or host format to warehouse
format
Load:
sort, summarize, consolidate, compute views, check
integrity, and build indicies and partitions
Refresh
propagate the updates from the data sources to the
warehouse
 Data Warehousing and
OLAP Technology for
Data
What Mining
is a data warehouse?

A multi-dimensional data model

Data warehouse architecture

Data warehouse implementation

Further development of data cube technology

From data warehousing to data mining

 Discovery-Driven
Exploration of Data Cubes
Hypothesis-driven: exploration by user, huge search space
Discovery-driven (Sarawagi et al.98)
pre-compute measures indicating exceptions, guide user in the
data analysis, at all levels of aggregation
Exception: significantly different from the value anticipated,
based on a statistical model
Visual cues such as background color are used to reflect the
degree of exception of each cell
Computation of exception indicator (modeling fitting and
computing SelfExp, InExp, and PathExp values) can be
overlapped with cube construction
Examples: Discovery-Driven
Data Cubes
 Data Warehousing and
OLAP Technology for
Data
What Mining
is a data warehouse?

A multi-dimensional data model

Data warehouse architecture

Data warehouse implementation

Further development of data cube technology

From data warehousing to data mining

Data Warehouse Usage
Three kinds of data warehouse applications
Information processing
supports querying, basic statistical analysis, and reporting
using crosstabs, tables, charts and graphs
Analytical processing
multidimensional analysis of data warehouse data
supports basic OLAP operations, slice-dice, drilling, pivoting
Data mining
knowledge discovery from hidden patterns
supports associations, constructing analytical models,
performing classification and prediction, and presenting the
mining results using visualization tools.
Differences among the three tasks
From On-Line Analytical
Processing to On Line
Analytical Mining
Why online analytical mining?
(OLAM)
High quality of data in data warehouses

DW contains integrated, consistent, cleaned data
Available information processing structure surrounding data
warehouses
ODBC, OLEDB, Web accessing, service facilities, reporting

and OLAP tools

OLAP-based exploratory data analysis
mining with drilling, dicing, pivoting, etc.

On-line selection of data mining functions

integration and swapping of multiple mining functions,

algorithms, and tasks.

Architecture of OLAM
 An OLAM Architecture
Mining query Mining result Layer4
User Interface
User GUI API
Layer3
OLAM OLAP
Engine Engine OLAP/OLAM

Data Cube API

Layer2
MDDB
MDDB
Meta
Data
Filtering&Integration Database API Filtering
Layer1
Data cleaning Data
Databases Data
Data integration Warehouse Repository
Summary
Data warehouse
A subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, and nonvolatile collection of
data in support of managements decision-making process
A multi-dimensional model of a data warehouse
Star schema, snowflake schema, fact constellations
A data cube consists of dimensions & measures
OLAP operations: drilling, rolling, slicing, dicing and pivoting
OLAP servers: ROLAP, MOLAP, HOLAP
Efficient computation of data cubes
Partial vs. full vs. no materialization
Multiway array aggregation
Bitmap index and join index implementations
Further development of data cube technology
Discovery-drive and multi-feature cubes
From OLAP to OLAM (on-line analytical mining)
References (I)
S. Agarwal, R. Agrawal, P. M. Deshpande, A. Gupta, J. F. Naughton, R. Ramakrishnan, and S.
Sarawagi. On the computation of multidimensional aggregates. In Proc. 1996 Int. Conf. Very
Large Data Bases, 506-521, Bombay, India, Sept. 1996.
D. Agrawal, A. E. Abbadi, A. Singh, and T. Yurek. Efficient view maintenance in data
warehouses. In Proc. 1997 ACM-SIGMOD Int. Conf. Management of Data, 417-427, Tucson,
Arizona, May 1997.
R. Agrawal, J. Gehrke, D. Gunopulos, and P. Raghavan. Automatic subspace clustering of high
dimensional data for data mining applications. In Proc. 1998 ACM-SIGMOD Int. Conf.
Management of Data, 94-105, Seattle, Washington, June 1998.
R. Agrawal, A. Gupta, and S. Sarawagi. Modeling multidimensional databases. In Proc. 1997
Int. Conf. Data Engineering, 232-243, Birmingham, England, April 1997.
K. Beyer and R. Ramakrishnan. Bottom-Up Computation of Sparse and Iceberg CUBEs. In
Proc. 1999 ACM-SIGMOD Int. Conf. Management of Data (SIGMOD'99), 359-370, Philadelphia,
PA, June 1999.
S. Chaudhuri and U. Dayal. An overview of data warehousing and OLAP technology. ACM
SIGMOD Record, 26:65-74, 1997.
OLAP council. MDAPI specification version 2.0. In
http://www.olapcouncil.org/research/apily.htm, 1998.
J. Gray, S. Chaudhuri, A. Bosworth, A. Layman, D. Reichart, M. Venkatrao, F. Pellow, and H.
Pirahesh. Data cube: A relational aggregation operator generalizing group-by, cross-tab and
sub-totals. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 1:29-54, 1997.
References (II)
V. Harinarayan, A. Rajaraman, and J. D. Ullman. Implementing data cubes efficiently. In
Proc. 1996 ACM-SIGMOD Int. Conf. Management of Data, pages 205-216, Montreal,
Canada, June 1996.
Microsoft. OLEDB for OLAP programmer's reference version 1.0. In
http://www.microsoft.com/data/oledb/olap, 1998.
K. Ross and D. Srivastava. Fast computation of sparse datacubes. In Proc. 1997 Int. Conf.
Very Large Data Bases, 116-125, Athens, Greece, Aug. 1997.
K. A. Ross, D. Srivastava, and D. Chatziantoniou. Complex aggregation at multiple
granularities. In Proc. Int. Conf. of Extending Database Technology (EDBT'98), 263-277,
Valencia, Spain, March 1998.
S. Sarawagi, R. Agrawal, and N. Megiddo. Discovery-driven exploration of OLAP data cubes.
In Proc. Int. Conf. of Extending Database Technology (EDBT'98), pages 168-182, Valencia,
Spain, March 1998.
E. Thomsen. OLAP Solutions: Building Multidimensional Information Systems. John Wiley &
Sons, 1997.
Y. Zhao, P. M. Deshpande, and J. F. Naughton. An array-based algorithm for simultaneous
multidimensional aggregates. In Proc. 1997 ACM-SIGMOD Int. Conf. Management of Data,
159-170, Tucson, Arizona, May 1997.
Selection of tables,
attributes, domains in the
If you are asked to design a data
DW design
warehouse for a process
set of operational
databases how would you do it?
Use specifications of requirements to design the
data warehouse schema and select:
The central theme(s) of the analysis (e.g., sales)
The measures on the central themes (e.g.,
sum(dollars))
The dimensions used by analytical processing
The attributes and hierarchies of the dimensions
Clean, transform, and integrate information
Example
A large company which sells engine parts
Database 1 (Los Angeles)
employee(id, name, dept, lot, salary, age)
department(id, name, type, manager_id)
part(id, name, type, brand, manufacturer, color)
customer(id, name, type, age, city, state, zip, tel)
sales(id, part_id, customer_id, quantity, price)
Database 2 (New York)
employee(id, ename, dept_id, salary, age)
department(id, name, type, manager)
part(id, title, type, brand, manufacturer, color)
customer(id, name, type, zip, tel)
location(zip, city_id)
city(city_id, state, country)
sales(id, part_id, customer_id, quantity, price)
Example: requirements and
selection
Requirements of the data warehouse
we want to analyze the total sales in dollars
and the average price of sold units with respect
to time, part, customer.
Selection of the basic features of the
warehouse
central theme(s): sales
measure(s): sum(sales_in_dollars),
avg(price_sold_units)
dimensions: time, part, customer
Example: selection of
hierarchies
To determine the dimension hierarchies we
have to select which dimensional attributes
are required to include for analysis
We go back to the requirements and ask
the analyst:
time: day, week, month, quarter, year
part: name, type, color, brand, manufacturer
customer: name, type, city, state, country
Exercise
Find the hierarchies for time, part,
customer

time: day, week, month, quarter, year

part: name, type, color, brand,
manufacturer
customer: name, type, city, state, country
Example: selection of
hierarchies
Definition of the hierarchies:

year manufacturer country

quarter state

month week type color brand type city

day name name

time part customer

Example: is the information
that we need to analyze
We have to check if the required
available?
information for analysis exists in the
databases to be integrated
All requested attributes exist, except from the
time. This can be determined by accessing the
transaction logs of the databases.
Example: Design the DW
schema
We use the star schema in this example
Time
time_id Fact table Customer
day time_id cust_id
week
part_id name
month
type
quarter cust_id
city
year quantity state
Part price country
part_id
name We need just quantity and (unit) price to derive
type sum(sales_in_dollars) = quantity*price
color
brand
avg(price_sold_units) =
manufacturer (quantity*price)/ (quantity)
Integration tasks
A large company which sells engine parts convert:
attribute names
Database 1 (Los Angeles) attribute types
employee(id, name, dept, lot, salary, age)
department(id, name, type, manager_id) join tables
part(id, name, type, brand, manufacturer, color)
derive data not
customer(id, name, type, age, city, state, zip, tel)
stored explicitly
sales(id, part_id, customer_id, quantity, price)
in the databases
Database 2 (New York)
employee(id, ename, dept_id, salary, age)
fill in missing
department(id, name, type, manager)
values
part(id, title, type, brand, manufacturer, color)
ignore irrelevant data:
customer(id, name, type, zip, tel)
tables
location(zip, city_id)
attributes
city(city_id, state, country)
sales(id, part_id, customer_id, quantity, price)
Example: how to populate the
DW?
Convert attribute names and types
Load, Clean, Integrate

E.g., part.name = part.title

Convert values to be consistent
Join tables if necessary
Join customer,location,city from New York DB
Derive time if not present
Check transaction log for sales table to get the time and convert it to
the required format
Complete missing values
The Los Angeles database does not record customer country
information because all its customers are from US. In the integrated
data from LA country value is set to USA
Ignore irrelevant tables and attributes
Tables employee, department are ignored
Attributes zip, tel, id are ignored.
How many cuboids ?
How do we compute the total number of
cuboids of a data cube?
Compute the product of the number of
levels for each dimension
Number of cuboids =
(levels for time)*
(levels for part)*
(levels for customer) =
5*4*5 = 100
What is the data cube?
The data cube is NOT a cube
Multiple dimensions, variable range and interpretations
of the cells, does not look always like a cube
The data cube is the set of all non-redundand,
multidimensional views from which we can
analyze the measures on the central theme(s)
Remember: the terms multidimensional view and
cuboid have the same meaning
A multidimensional view is non-redundant, if
there are no hierarchical relationships between its
dimensional attributes
Redundancy in views
A non-redundant combination of month
attributes: 23 12 23 11 5067
(month, part_type) 10 20 43 33 13 22

part_type
58 18 72 25 30 25
23 12 0 40 9012
23 45 43 33 13 1
2 0 56 23 6 25

A redundant (not useful)

combination of attributes: part_brand

manufacturer
(part_brand, part_manufacturer) 23 12 0 0 0 0
0 0 43 33 13 0
0 0 0 0 0 25
Exercise
Find the non-redundant combinations of
the attributes of part.

manufacturer

type color brand

name
part
Visualization of non-redundant
attribute combinations for part
ALL

manufacturer

type color brand

(type,color) (type, manufacturer) (color, manufacturer)

(color,brand) (type,brand) (type,color,manufacturer)

(type,color,brand)

name

part
How many (non-redundant)
cuboids

?
How do we compute the total number of cuboids of a data
cube?
Compute the product of the number of combinations for
each dimension
Number of cuboids =
(combinations for time)*
(combinations for part)*
(combinations for customer) =
6*13*9 = 702
Note: sometimes we use the term cuboid to also denote
multidimensional views with selections:
total sales for each (part.type,customer.city) for year = 2001
We do not count such cuboids in the computation above
 Cube: A Lattice of
Cuboidsall E.g., (location) is dependent on
(time,item,location)

time item location supplier

time,item time,location item,location location,supplier

time,supplier item,supplier

time,location,supplier
time,item,location

time,item,supplier item,location,supplier

time, item, location, supplier

How to answer queries from a
set

of materialized cuboids?
In real-life examples it is not possible to materialize the
whole data cube
Typically, a small subset of cuboids is materialized
To answer a query we have to select the cuboid that results
in the minimum cost for the query
A query typically consists of
a set of group-by attributes
a set of selection clauses
E.g., compute the total sales per part.type, cust.city for
year=2002.
The factors for selecting the best cuboid for a particular
query are:
the size of the cuboid
any indexes on the attributes of the select clause of the query
 Cube: A Lattice of
Cuboids
= materialized
cuboid all
How would you compute the
following queries?
Q1: <time,item>
Q2: <supplier>
time item location supplier Q3: <location>
Q4: <time,supplier>
Q5: <item>
time,item time,location item,location location,supplier

time,supplier item,supplier

time,location,supplier
time,item,location

time,item,supplier item,location,supplier

time, item, location, supplier

Which cuboids should we
materialize?
In real-life examples it is not possible to materialize the
whole data cube
We have to select the most beneficial cuboids to materialize
This depends mainly on the size of the cuboids and their
usage by queries
Thus to select we need information about (i) the size of
cuboids, (ii) the queries and their frequency
The base cuboid almost always corresponds to the fact table,
which is already materialized. For example, if the products
have unique name, and customers unique name, we can
use:
time_id to derive the day
part_id to derive part.name
cust_id to derive customer.name
Which cuboids should we
materialize?
Example
candidate cuboids:
(day,pname,cname) 100GB (already materialized)
(day,pname) 60GB
(day,cname) 20GB
(pname,cname) 1GB
(day) 10GB Exercise: Which views
(pname) 200MB
should we materialize if
(cname) 30MB
(ALL) 8 bytes
the available space is:
queries (with equal probability)
1. 10GB
Q1: total sales per (pname,cname) 2. 1GB
Q2: total sales per (pname) 3. 100MB
Q3: total sales per (cname)
Which cuboids should we
materialize?
Case 1: Available space = 10GB
We can materialize all three views (pname,cname) ,
(pname), and (cname)
The cost of Q1 is reading 1GB
The cost of Q2 is reading 200MB
The cost of Q3 is reading 30MB
Average query cost = (1230MB)/3=410 MB/query
Which cuboids should we
materialize?
Case 2: Available space = 1GB
We have two choices:
materialize (pname,cname) using 1GB
Q1 costs 1GB, Q2 costs 1GB, Q3 costs 1GB
Average query cost = 1GB
materialize (pname) and (cname) using 230MB
Q1 costs 100GB, Q2 costs 200MB, Q3 costs 30MB
Average query cost = (100,230MB)/3 = 34GB
First choice is better than the second!
Which cuboids should we
materialize?
Case 3: Available space = 100MB
We can only materialize (cname)
Q1 costs 100GB
Q2 costs 100GB
Q3 costs 30MB
Average query cost = (200,030MB)/3 = 67GB
Bitmap Indexes
The bitmap index is used to index attributes with
small domains
For each attribute value, a bitmap is defined to
indicate the rows of the table that contain this
value
Bitmaps are useful especially when we want to
join some attribute values
Example: find the total sales of red parts to
female customers
Bitmap Indexes - Example
100 bytes
date pcolor cname cgender sales
10/10/00 red Smith M 21
12/10/00 green Jones F 13
15/10/00 green Kane M 14
20/10/00 blue Nike M 23 1 billion rows
22/11/00 red Ellis F 9
26/11/00 red Jones F 92
... ... ... ... ...
index for pcolor index for gender Exercise:
red green blue M F 1. what are the sizes of
1 0 0 1 0 the table and indexes
0 1 0 0 1 2. what is the cost of the
0 1 0 1 0 query: find the total sales of
0 0 1 1 0 red parts to female
1 0 0 0 1 customers if:
1 0 0 0 1 a) the table is used
... ... ... ... ... b) the indexes are used
Bitmap Indexes - Example
The size of the table is 100GB=100bytes*1billion
The size of the indexes are:
3bits*1billion = 3000Mbits = 375MB
2bits*1billion = 2000Mbits = 250MB
The cost of evaluating the query directly on the table is reading
100GB and for each of the 1 billion tuples perform a comparison
with red and F (expensive)
The cost of evaluating the query using the indexes is:
read bitmap for red, read bitmap for F and join them.
This costs reading 1Gbits+1Gbits = 250MB
for each join result accumulate the sales for the corresponding rid
this retrieves (1/3)*(1/2) = 1/6 tuples (estimated) and accumulates them
we will probably read the whole table (since we want to avoid random
accesses), but we will avoid any comparisons.