By István Szépkúti | published 2011-04-26 |
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It is commonly accepted in the practice of on-line analytical processing of
databases that the multidimensional database organization is less scalable than
the relational one. It is easy to see that the size of the multidimensional
organization may increase very quickly. For example, if we introduce one
additional dimension, then the total number of possible cells will be at least
doubled. However, this reasoning does not takethe fact into account that the
multidimensional organization can be compressed. There are compression
techniques, which can remove all or at least a part of the empty cells from the
multidimensional organization, while maintaining a good retrieval performance.
Relational databases often use B-tree indices to speed up the access to given
rows of tables. It can be proven, under some reasonable assumptions, that the
total size of the table and the B-tree index is bigger than a compressed
multidimensional representation. This implies that the compressed array results
in a smaller database and faster access at the same time. This paper compares
several compression techniques and shows when we should and should not apply
compressed arrays instead of relational tables.
... http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3753