An Efficient Approach for Providing multidimensional Data on Relational DBMSs
Jinho Kim, Sung-Hyun Shin, Hun-Young Choi, Yang‐Sae Moon · 2007
Multidimensional data are used in popular to support OLAP(On-Line Analytical Processing) operations efficiently. Many OLAP tools have been developed to manipulate the multidimensional data to provide users with useful information for decision making. While they are equipped with useful features, they seem be sometimes complicated to relational database users. In this paper, we developed an easy and effective interface manipulating multidimensional data on the top of relational DBMSs. The proposed interface provides a mechanism handling data in relational tables like spreadsheet (e.g., Microsoft Excel) does. Spreadsheet is the most popular tool for end users to analysis their data conveniently. The interface provides the features browsing relational tables virtually with sheet by sheet and creating pivot tables. Pivot tables are a useful presentation form of multidimensional data, which have attribute values (not attribute names) as their columns thus have horizontal format. We store pivot tables of horizontal format as vertical tables in relational DBMSs and we provide the transformation of queries on horizontal table into ones on vertical tables. With this user-friendly interface, users will be able to perform analysis