Data Warehousing & Data Mining

Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP)

1
 Recap
• OLAP introduction
• OLAP Architecture
• OLAP FASMI Test

2
 Outline
• MOLAP introduction
• Aggregations in MOLAP
• Cube Operations
• Advantages and Disadvantages

3
 OLAP Implementations
1. MOLAP: OLAP implemented with a multi-dimensional
data structure.

2. ROLAP: OLAP implemented with a relational database.

4
 MOLAP Implementations
OLAP has historically been implemented using a
multi_dimensional data structure or “cube”.

• Dimensions are key business factors for analysis:

– Geographies (city, district, division, province,...)
– Products (item, product category, product department,...)
– Dates (day, week, month, quarter, year,...)

• Very high performance achieved by O(1) time lookup

into “cube” data structure to retrieve pre_aggregated
results.

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 MOLAP Implementations
• No standard query language for querying MOLAP
- No SQL !

• Vendors provide proprietary languages allowing business

users to create queries that involve pivots, drilling down,
or rolling up.
- E.g. MDX of Microsoft

- Application Programming Interface (API)’s also provided for

probing the cubes.

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 Aggregations in MOLAP
 Sales volume as a function of (i) product, (ii) time,
and (iii) geography

 A cube structure created to handle this.

Dimensions: Product, Geography, Time S
W
E
Hierarchical summarization paths N
Milk
Industry Province Year 23

Product
Bread 8
Category Division Quarter Eggs 45
Butter 13
Product District Month Week 12
Jam
Juice 10
City Day
w1 w2 w3 w4 w5 w6
Zone Time 7
 Cube operations
There are four fundamental cubes operations
• Rollup: summarize data
– The roll-up operation performs aggregation on a data cube either by
climbing up the hierarchy or by dimension reduction.

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 Cube operations
• Drill down: get more details
Drill-down is the reverse of roll-up. It can be done via
-Moving down the
concept hierarchy.
-Increasing a dimension

9
 Cube operations
• Slice and dice: select and project
Slice: one dimension is selected, and a new sub-cube is created.

10
 Cube operations
• Dice: select 2 or more dimensions that result in the creation of a sub-
cube.

11
 Cube operations
• Pivot: you rotate the data axes to provide a substitute presentation of
data.

12
 Querying the cube
40,000
Juices Soda Drinks 14,000
35,000 Juices Soda Drinks
30,000 12,000
25,000
20,000 Drill-Down 10,000
15,000 8,000
10,000
5,000 6,000
-
4,000
2001 2002 Roll-Up
2,000
-
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
2001 2002

12,000
OJ RK 8UP PK MJ BU AJ
10,000

8,000 Drill-down
6,000

4,000

2,000

-
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 13
2001 Ahsan Abdullah 2002
Querying the cube: Pivoting
40,000
Juices Soda Drinks
35,000
30,000
25,000
20,000
15,000
10,000
5,000
-
2001 2002

18,000
2001 2002
16,000
14,000
12,000
10,000
8,000
6,000
4,000
2,000
-
Orange Mango Apple Rola- 8-UP Bubbly- Pola-
juice juice juice Kola UP Kola

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 MOLAP evaluation
Advantages of MOLAP:

 Instant response (pre-calculated aggregates).

 Impossible to ask question without an answer.

 Value added functions (ranking, % change).

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 MOLAP evaluation
Drawbacks of MOLAP:

 Long load time ( pre-calculating the cube

may take days!).

 Very sparse cube (wastage of space) for

high cardinality (sometimes in small
hundreds). e.g. number of heaters sold in
Jacobabad or Sibi.

MOLAP are not capable of containing detailed

data. 16
 MOLAP Implementation issues
Maintenance issue: Every data item
received must be aggregated into every
cube (assuming “to-date” summaries
are maintained). Lot of work.

17
MOLAP vs ROLAP

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 Reference
• https://www.tutorialspoint.com/dwh/pdf/dwh_olap.pdf
• https://www.tutorialspoint.com/dwh/dwh_multidimensional_olap.htm

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