Measuring the Sky: On Computing Data Cubes via Skylining the Measures

摘要

Data cube is a key element in supporting fast OLAP. Traditionally, an aggregate function is used to compute the values in data cubes. In this paper, we extend the notion of data cubes with a new perspective. Instead of using an aggregate function, we propose to build data cubes using the skyline operation as the ȁC;aggregate function.ȁD; Data cubes built in this way are called ȁC;group-by skyline cubesȁD; and can support a variety of analytical tasks. Nevertheless, there are several challenges in implementing group-by skyline cubes in data warehouses: 1) the skyline operation is computational intensive, 2) the skyline operation is holistic, and 3) a group-by skyline cube contains both grouping and skyline dimensions, rendering it infeasible to precompute all cuboids in advance. This paper gives details on how to store, materialize, and query such cubes.