Improving OLAP Performance by Multidimensional Hierarchical Clustering

Data-warehousing applications cope with enormous data sets in the range of Gigabytes and Terabytes. Queries usually either select a very small set of this data or perform aggregations on a fairly large data set. Materialized views storing pre-computed aggregates are used to efficiently process queries with aggregations. This approach increases resource requirements in disk space and slows down updates because of the view maintenance problem. Multidimensional hierarchical clustering (MHC) of OLAP data overcomes these problems while offering more flexibility for aggregation paths. Clustering is introduced as a way to speed up aggregation queries without additional storage cost for materialization. Performance and storage cost of our access method are investigated and compared to current query processing scenarios. In addition performance measurements on real world data for a typical star schema are presented.