Data Warehousing: OLAP

CS2202

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 What is a Data Warehouse?
• Defined in many different ways, but not rigorously.
– A decision support database that is maintained separately from the
organization’s operational database
– Support information processing by providing a solid platform of consolidated,
historical data for analysis.
• “A data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, and nonvolatile
collection of data in support of management’s decision-making process.”—W. H.
Inmon
• Data warehousing:
– The process of constructing and using data warehouses
Source: Data Mining Concepts and Techniques by Han, Kamber and Pei
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 Data Warehouse—Subject-Oriented
• Organized around major subjects, such as customer, product, sales
• Focusing on the modeling and analysis of data for decision makers, not on daily
operations or transaction processing
• Provide a simple and concise view around particular subject issues by excluding
data that are not useful in the decision support process

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 Data Warehouse—Integrated
• Constructed by integrating multiple, heterogeneous data sources
– relational databases, flat files, on-line transaction records
• Data cleaning and data integration techniques are applied.
– Ensure consistency in naming conventions, encoding structures, attribute
measures, etc. among different data sources
• E.g., Hotel price: currency, tax, breakfast covered, etc.
– When data is moved to the warehouse, it is converted.

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 Data Warehouse—Time Variant
• The time horizon for the data warehouse is significantly longer than that of
operational systems
– Operational database: current value data
– Data warehouse data: provide information from a historical perspective (e.g.,
past 5-10 years)
• Every key structure in the data warehouse
– Contains an element of time, explicitly or implicitly
– But the key of operational data may or may not contain “time element”

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 Data Warehouse—Nonvolatile
• A physically separate store of data transformed from the operational environment
• Operational update of data does not occur in the data warehouse environment
– Does not require transaction processing, recovery, and concurrency control
mechanisms
– Requires only two operations in data accessing:
• initial loading of data and access of data

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 Data Warehouse
• Data Generalization & Consolidation – Data warehouses organize and summarize
data in a multidimensional space for better analysis.
• Preprocessing Steps – The construction of data warehouses involves:
– Data Cleaning (removing inconsistencies and errors),
– Data Integration (merging data from multiple sources), and
– Data Transformation (converting data into a suitable format).

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• Role in Data Mining – Data warehouses act as a preprocessing step for data mining
by preparing structured and clean data
• OLAP Support – Data warehouses provide Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
tools for interactive and efficient analysis.
• Multidimensional Analysis – OLAP tools help analyze data across multiple
dimensions and granularities, enhancing data generalization and mining.

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 Key points
• Separate from Operational Databases – A data warehouse is maintained
independently from an organization’s day-to-day transactional databases.
• Integration of Multiple Systems – It allows the combination of data from different
application systems.
• Supports Information Processing – Provides a structured platform for analyzing
business data.
• Historical Data Storage – Stores consolidated historic data for long-term analysis
and decision-making.

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 OLTP and OLAP
• OLTP Systems (Online Transaction Processing) – Handle real-time transactions and
queries for daily business operations.
• Common OLTP Applications – Used in purchasing, inventory, manufacturing,
banking, payroll, registration, and accounting.
• OLAP Systems (Online Analytical Processing) – Designed for data analysis and
decision-making, assisting knowledge workers.
• Data Organization & Presentation – OLAP systems organize and present data in
different formats to meet diverse user needs.

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OLTP vs. OLAP

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 Why a Separate Data Warehouse?
• High performance for both systems
– DBMS— tuned for OLTP: access methods, indexing, concurrency control, recovery
– Warehouse—tuned for OLAP: complex OLAP queries, multidimensional view,
consolidation
• Different functions and different data:
– missing data: Decision support requires historical data which operational DBs do not
typically maintain
– data consolidation: DS requires consolidation (aggregation, summarization) of data from
heterogeneous sources
– data quality: different sources typically use inconsistent data representations, codes and
formats which have to be reconciled
• Note: There are more and more systems which perform OLAP analysis directly on relational
databases

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A three tier data
warehousing
architecture

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 Bottom Tier
• The bottom tier consists of a warehouse database server, typically a relational
database system.
• Data Feeding Process – Back-end tools and utilities extract, clean, transform, load,
and refresh data from operational databases and external sources.
• Data Extraction Using Gateways – Gateways act as interfaces for extracting data
using SQL queries. Examples include:
– ODBC (Open Database Connection)
– OLEDB (Object Linking and Embedding Database)
– JDBC (Java Database Connection)
• Metadata Repository – Stores information about the data warehouse and its
contents for management and query optimization.
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 Middle Tier
• Middle Tier in Data Warehouse Architecture – Functions as an OLAP (Online
Analytical Processing) server for data analysis.
• Types of OLAP Implementations:
– ROLAP (Relational OLAP) – Uses an extended relational database to map
multidimensional data to relational operations.
– MOLAP (Multidimensional OLAP) – Uses a specialized server that directly
handles multidimensional data and operations.

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 Top Tier
• Top Tier in Data Warehouse Architecture – Serves as the front-end client layer for
user interaction.
• Contains Various Tools:
– Query and Reporting Tools – For generating reports and retrieving data.
– Analysis Tools – Used for data exploration and visualization.
– Data Mining Tools – Perform advanced functions like trend analysis and
prediction.

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 Three Data Warehouse Models
• Enterprise warehouse
– collects all of the information about subjects spanning the entire organization
• Data Mart
– a subset of corporate-wide data that is of value to a specific groups of users. Its
scope is confined to specific, selected groups, such as marketing data mart
• Independent vs. dependent (directly from warehouse) data mart
• Virtual warehouse
– A set of views over operational databases
– Only some of the possible summary views may be materialized

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 Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL)
• 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 indices
and partitions
• Refresh
– propagate the updates from the data sources to the warehouse

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 Metadata Repository
• Meta data is the data defining warehouse objects. It stores:
• Description of the structure of the data warehouse
– schema, view, dimensions, hierarchies, derived data definition, 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 19
2D view of sales data according to time and item

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3D view of sales data according to time, item and location

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 3-D data cube representation of the
data according to time, item and
location.
 The measure displayed is dollars_sold
(in thousands)

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A 4-D data cube representation of sales data, according to time, item,
location and supplier
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 From Tables and Spreadsheets to Data Cubes
• A data warehouse is based on a multidimensional data model which views data in the
form of a data cube
• A data cube, such as sales, allows data to be modeled and viewed in multiple dimensions
– Dimension tables, such as item (item_name, brand, type), or time(day, week,
month, quarter, year)
– Fact table contains measures (such as dollars_sold) and keys to each of the related
dimension tables
• In data warehousing literature, an n-D base cube is called a base cuboid. The top most 0-
D cuboid, which holds the highest-level of summarization, is called the apex cuboid. The
lattice of cuboids forms a data cube.

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 Cube: A Lattice of Cuboids
all
0-D (apex) cuboid
time location supplier
item
1-D cuboids
location,supplier
time,location item,location
time,supplier 2-D cuboids
item,supplier
time,item
3-D cuboids
time,item, time,location, item,location,
time,item,
supplier supplier supplier
location 4-D (base) cuboid
time, item, location, supplier

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 Conceptual Modeling of Data Warehouses
• Modeling data warehouses: dimensions & measures
– Star schema: A fact table in the middle connected to a set of dimension tables
– Snowflake schema: A refinement of star schema where some dimensional
hierarchy is normalized into a set of smaller dimension tables, forming a shape
similar to snowflake
– Fact constellations: Multiple fact tables share dimension tables, viewed as a
collection of stars, therefore called galaxy schema or fact constellation

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 Example of Star Schema
time item
time_key item_key
day item_name
day_of_the_week Sales Fact Table
brand
month time_key type
quarter item_key supplier_type
year branch_key
location_key location
branch
location_key
branch_key units_sold street
branch_name dollars_sold city
branch_type
avg_sales state_or_province
Measures country
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 Example of Snowflake Schema
time
time_key item
supplier
day item_key
day_of_the_week Sales Fact Table item_name supplier_key
month time_key brand supplier_type
quarter item_key type
year supplier_key
branch_key
branch location_key location
branch_key location_key
units_sold
branch_name street city
dollars_sold city_key
branch_type city_key
avg_sales city
Measures state_or_province
country 28
 Example of Fact Constellation
time
time_key item Shipping Fact Table
day item_key
day_of_the_week Sales Fact Table item_name time_key
month time_key brand item_key
quarter type shipper_key
year item_key supplier_type
branch_key from_location
branch location_key location to_location
branch_key location_key dollars_cost
units_sold
branch_name street
dollars_sold units_shipped
branch_type city
avg_sales province_or_state shipper
Measures country shipper_key
shipper_name
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location_key
Also known as Galaxy schema shipper_type
 A Concept Hierarchy: Dimension (location)
all all

region Europe ... North_America

country Germany ... Spain Canada ... Mexico

city Frankfurt Vancouver ... Toronto

...
office L. Chan ... M. Wind

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 Data Cube Measures: Three Categories
• Distributive: if the result derived by applying the function to n aggregate values is the
same as that derived by applying the function on all the data without partitioning
• E.g., count(), sum(), min(), max()
• Algebraic: if it can be computed by an algebraic function with M arguments (where M
is a bounded integer), each of which is obtained by applying a distributive aggregate
function
• E.g., avg(), min_N(), standard_deviation()
• Holistic: if there is no constant bound on the storage size needed to describe a
subaggregate. There does not exist an algebraic function with M arguments that
characterizes the computation.
• E.g., median(), mode(), rank()
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 Multidimensional Data
• Sales volume as a function of product, month, and region

Dimensions: Product, Location, Time

Hierarchical summarization paths
Industry Region Year

Category Country Quarter

Product

Product City Month Week

Office Day
Month
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 A Sample Data Cube
Total annual sales
Date
of TVs in U.S.A.
2Qtr
TV 1Qtr 3Qtr 4Qtr sum
PC U.S.A
VCR
sum

Country
Canada
Mexico

sum

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 Cuboids Corresponding to the Cube

all
0-D (apex) cuboid
product date country
1-D cuboids
product,date product,country date, country
2-D cuboids

3-D (base) cuboid

product, date, country

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 Typical OLAP Operations
• Roll up (drill-up): summarize data
– by climbing up hierarchy or by dimension reduction
• Drill down (roll down): reverse of roll-up
– from higher level summary to lower level summary or detailed data, or introducing
new dimensions
• Slice and dice: project and select
• Pivot (rotate):
– reorient the cube, visualization, 3D to series of 2D planes
• Other operations
– drill across: involving (across) more than one fact table
– drill through: through the bottom level of the cube to its back-end relational tables
(using SQL)
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Typical OLAP
Operations

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 A Star-Net Query Model
 Each line represents a concept
hierarchy for each dimension
 Each circle or abstraction level in the
hierarchy is called a footprint
 Represent the granularities available
for use by OLAP operations such as
drill-down and roll-up

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Browsing a Data Cube

• Visualization
• OLAP capabilities
• Interactive manipulation
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 Design of Data Warehouse: A Business Analysis
Framework
• Four views regarding the design of a data warehouse
– Top-down view
• allows selection of the relevant information necessary for the data warehouse
– Data source view
• exposes the information being captured, stored, and managed by operational
systems
– Data warehouse view
• consists of fact tables and dimension tables
– Business query view
• sees the perspectives of data in the warehouse from the view of end-user

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 Data Warehouse Design Process
• Top-down, bottom-up approaches or a combination of both
– Top-down: Starts with overall design and planning (mature)
– Bottom-up: Starts with experiments and prototypes (early stage)
• From software engineering point of view
– Waterfall: structured and systematic analysis at each step before proceeding to the
next
– Spiral: rapid generation of increasingly functional systems, short turn around time,
quick turn around
• Typical data warehouse design process
– Choose a business process to model, e.g., orders, invoices, etc.
– Choose the grain (atomic level of data) of the business process
– Choose the dimensions that will apply to each fact table record
– Choose the measure that will populate each fact table record
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 Data Warehouse Development: A
Recommended Approach
Multi-Tier Data
Warehouse
Distributed Data
Marts

Data Mart Data Mart Enterprise Data

Warehouse

Model refinement Model refinement

Define a high-level corporate data model

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 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
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 From On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP)
to On Line Analytical Mining (OLAM)
• Why online analytical mining?
– 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

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 Efficient Data Cube Computation

• 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.

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 The “Compute Cube” Operator
• 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 (city) (item) (year)
CUBE BY item, city, year
• Need compute the following Group-Bys
(city, item) (city, year) (item, year)
(city, item, year),
(city,item),(city, year), (item, year),
(city), (item), (year) (city, item, year)
() 45
 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 RecID Asia 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
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 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
• 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 location maintains for each distinct
location a list of R-IDs of the tuples recording the
Sales in the city
– Join indices can span multiple dimensions
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 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 which materialized cuboid(s) should be selected for OLAP op.
– Let the query to be processed be on {brand, province_or_state} with the condition “year =
2004”, and there are 4 materialized cuboids available:
1) {year, item_name, city}
2) {year, brand, country}
3) {year, brand, province_or_state}
4) {item_name, province_or_state} where year = 2004
Which should be selected to process the query?
• Explore indexing structures and compressed vs. dense array structs in MOLAP

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 OLAP Server Architectures
• Relational OLAP (ROLAP)
– Use relational or extended-relational DBMS to store and manage warehouse data
and OLAP middle ware
– Include optimization of DBMS backend, implementation of aggregation navigation
logic, and additional tools and services
– Greater scalability
• Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP)
– Sparse array-based multidimensional storage engine
– Fast indexing to pre-computed summarized data
• Hybrid OLAP (HOLAP) (e.g., Microsoft SQLServer)
– Flexibility, e.g., low level: relational, high-level: array
• Specialized SQL servers (e.g., Redbricks)
– Specialized support for SQL queries over star/snowflake schemas
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