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Parallel OLAP for Relational Database Environments
On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) has become a fundamental component of
contemporary decision support systems and represents a means by which
knowledge workers can efficiently analyze vast amounts of organizational
data. Within the OLAP context, one of the more interesting recent themes
has been the computation and manipulation of the data cube, a relational
model that can be used to represent summarized multi-dimensional views of
massive data warehousing archives.
Over the past five or six
years a number of efficient sequential algorithms for data cube
construction have been presented. Given the size of the underlying data
sets, however, it is perhaps surprising that relatively little effort has
been expended on the design of load balanced, communication efficient
algorithms for the parallelization of the data cube. Our current research
investigates opportunities for high performance data cube computation,
with a particular emphasis upon contemporary parallel architectures and
relational database environments. In this talk, new parallel algorithms
for the computation of both the complete data cube and the partial data
cube will be presented. In addition, a model for distributed
multi-dimensional indexing is proposed. The associated parallel query
engine not only supports efficient range queries, but query resolution on
non-materialized views and views containing hierarchical attributes as
well. Key design features of the physical architecture will also be
discussed
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