Transbase: a Leading-edge ROLAP Engine Supporting Multidimensional Indexing and Hierarchy Clustering

Analysis-oriented database applications, such as data warehousing or customer relationship management, play a crucial role in the database area. In general, the multidimensional data model is used in these applications, realized as star or snow-flake schemata in the relational world. The so-called star queries are the prevalent type of queries on such schemata. All database vendors have extended their products to support star queries efficiently. However, mostly reporting queries benefit from the optimizations, like pre-aggregation, while adhoc queries usually lack efficient support. We present the DBMS Transbase in this paper, which provides a new physical organization of the data based on hierarchical clustering and multidimensional clustering combined with multidimensional indexing. In combination with new query optimizations (e.g., hierarchical pre-grouping) significant performance improvements are achieved. The paper describes how the new technology is implemented in the Transbase product and how it is made available to the user as transparently as possible. The benefits are illustrated with a real-world data warehousing scenario.