CURE for cubes: cubing using a ROLAP engine

Data cube construction has been the focus of much research due to its importance in improving efficiency of OLAP. A significant fraction of this work has been on ROLAP techniques, which are based on relational technology. Existing ROLAP cubing solutions mainly focus on "flat" datasets, which do not include hierarchies in their dimensions. Nevertheless, the nature of hierarchies introduces several complications into cube construction, making existing techniques essentially inapplicable in a significant number of real-world applications. In particular, hierarchies raise three main challenges: (a) The number of nodes in a cube lattice increases dramatically and its shape is more involved. These require new forms of lattice traversal for efficient execution. (b) The number of unique values in the higher levels of a dimension hierarchy may be very small; hence, partitioning data into fragments that fit in memory and include all entries of a particular value may often be impossible. This requires new partitioning schemes. (c) The number of tuples that need to be materialized in the final cube increases dramatically. This requires new storage schemes that remove all forms of redundancy for efficient space utilization. In this paper, we propose CURE, a novel ROLAP cubing method that addresses these issues and constructs complete data cubes over very large datasets with arbitrary hierarchies. CURE contributes a novel lattice traversal scheme, an optimized partitioning method, and a suite of relational storage schemes for all forms of redundancy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CURE through experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets. Among the experimental results, we distinguish those that have made CURE the first ROLAP technique to complete the construction of the cube of the highest-density dataset in the APB-1 benchmark (12 GB). CURE was in fact quite efficient on this, showing great promise with respect to the potential of the technique overall.