Data Warehouses and Data Cubes

Han Textbook Chapter2

Will not say much about data warehouses but
will give a brief introduction to the multi-
dimensional data model and data cubes in
this lecture.
Distinguished Speaker Friday 11a in 232 PGH
(http://www.cs.uh.edu/docs/cosc/seminars/201
0/11.05-srivastava.pdf )!!!

Han: Data Cubes 1

 What is Data Warehouse?
Defined in many different ways, but not rigorously.
A decision support database that is maintained
separately from the organizations 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 managements decision-making process.W. H.
Inmon
Data warehousing:
The process of constructing and using data
warehouses
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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 and Interactive Analysis
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
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 Data Warehouse vs. Heterogeneous DBMS

Traditional heterogeneous DB integration:

Build wrappers/mediators on top of heterogeneous databases
Query driven approach
When a query is posed to a client site, a meta-dictionary is
used to translate the query into queries appropriate for
individual heterogeneous sites involved, and the results are
integrated into a global answer set
Complex information filtering, compete for resources
Data warehouse: update-driven, high performance
Information from heterogeneous sources is integrated in advance
and stored in warehouses for direct query and analysis

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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

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 Data Cube Terminology

A data cube supports viewing/modelling of a variable

(a set of variables) of interest. Measures are used to
report the values of the particular variable with respect
to a given set of dimensions.
A fact table stores measures as well as keys
representing relationships to various dimensions.
Dimensions are perspectives with respect to which an
organization wants to keep record.
A star schema defines a fact table and its associated
dimensions.

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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
time_key item
day item_key
day_of_the_week Sales Fact Table item_name
month brand
quarter time_key type
year supplier_type
item_key
branch_key
branch location
location_key
branch_key location_key
branch_name units_sold street
branch_type city
dollars_sold province_or_street
country
avg_sales
Measures

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 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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 View of Warehouses and Hierarchies

Specification of hierarchies
Schema hierarchy
day < {month <
quarter; week} < year
Set_grouping hierarchy
{1..10} < inexpensive

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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 TV in U.S.A.
1Qtr 2Qtr 3Qtr 4Qtr sum
TV
PC U.S.A
VCR

Country
sum
Canada

Mexico

sum

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 Browsing a Data Cube

Visualization
OLAP capabilities
Interactive manipulation
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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

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 A Star-Net Query Model
Customer Orders
Shipping Method
Customer
CONTRACTS
AIR-EXPRESS

ORDER
TRUCK
PRODUCT LINE
Time Product
ANNUALY QTRLY DAILY PRODUCT ITEM PRODUCT GROUP
CITY
SALES PERSON
COUNTRY
DISTRICT

REGION
DIVISION
Location Each circle is
called a footprint Promotion Organization
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 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
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 Examples: Discovery-Driven Data Cubes

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 Software to Work with Data Cubes

http://www.bi-verdict.com/
http://www.bi-
verdict.com/fileadmin/FreeAnalyses/Comment_
OLAP_revival.htm

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 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 allows to view measures with respect to a given
set of dimensions
OLAP operations: drilling, rolling, slicing, dicing and
pivoting

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 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.
Han: Data Cubes 20
 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.
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