Abstract
Schema design is one of the fundamentals in database theory and practice as well. In this paper, we discuss the problem of locally valid dimensional attributes in a classification hierarchy of a typical OLAP scenario. In a first step, we show that the traditional star and snowflake schema approach is not feasible in this very natural case of a hierarchy. Therefore, we sketch two alternative modeling approaches resulting in practical solutions and a seamless extension of the traditional star and snowflake schema approach: In a pure relational approach, we replace each dimension table of a star / snowflake schema by a set of views directly reflecting the classification hierarchy. The second approach takes advantage of the object-relational extensions. Using object-relational techniques in the context for the relational representation of a multidimensional OLAP scenario is a novel approach and promises a clean and smooth schema design.
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Bauer, A., Hümmer, W., Lehner, W. (2000). An Alternative Relational OLAP Modeling Approach. In: Kambayashi, Y., Mohania, M., Tjoa, A.M. (eds) Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery. DaWaK 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1874. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44466-1_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44466-1_19
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