One utilisation of multidimensional databases is the field of On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP). The applications in this area are designed to make the analysis of shared multidimensional information fast PendseB. On one hand, speed can be achieved by specially devised data structures and algorithms. On the other hand, the analytical process is cyclic. In other words, the user of the OLAP application runs his or her queries one after the other. The output of the last query may be there (at least partly) in one of the previous results. Therefore caching also plays an important role in the operation of these systems. However, caching itself may not be enough to ensure acceptable performance. Size does matter: The more memory is available, the more we gain by loading and keeping information in there. Oftentimes, the cache size is fixed. This limits the performance of the multidimensional database, as well, unless we compress the data in order to move a greater proportion of them into the memory. Caching combined with proper compression methods promise further performance improvements. In this paper, we investigate how caching influences the speed of OLAP systems. Different physical representations (multidimensional and table) are evaluated. For the thorough comparison, models are proposed. We draw conclusions based on these models, and the conclusions are verified with empirical data.
Chen @cite_23 propose a Hierarchical Dictionary Encoding and discusses query optimization issues. Both of these topics are beyond the scope of our paper.
@cite_23
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Over the last decades, improvements in CPU speed have outpaced improvements in main memory and disk access rates by orders of magnitude, enabling the use of data compression techniques to improve the performance of database systems. Previous work describes the benefits of compression for numerical attributes, where data is stored in compressed format on disk. Despite the abundance of string-valued attributes in relational schemas there is little work on compression for string attributes in a database context. Moreover, none of the previous work suitably addresses the role of the query optimizer: During query execution, data is either eagerly decompressed when it is read into main memory, or data lazily stays compressed in main memory and is decompressed on demand only In this paper, we present an effective approach for database compression based on lightweight, attribute-level compression techniques. We propose a IIierarchical Dictionary Encoding strategy that intelligently selects the most effective compression method for string-valued attributes. We show that eager and lazy decompression strategies produce sub-optimal plans for queries involving compressed string attributes. We then formalize the problem of compression-aware query optimization and propose one provably optimal and two fast heuristic algorithms for selecting a query plan for relational schemas with compressed attributes; our algorithms can easily be integrated into existing cost-based query optimizers. Experiments using TPC-H data demonstrate the impact of our string compression methods and show the importance of compression-aware query optimization. Our approach results in up to an order speed up over existing approaches.