Data Warehousing and Decision

Support

Chapter 23, Part A

Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 1

Introduction
™ Increasingly, organizations are analyzing
current and historical data to identify useful
patterns and support business strategies.
™ Emphasis is on complex, interactive,
exploratory analysis of very large datasets
created by integrating data from across all
parts of an enterprise; data is fairly static.
ƒ Contrast such On-Line Analytic Processing
(OLAP) with traditional On-line Transaction
Processing (OLTP): mostly long queries, instead
of short update Xacts.
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 2

Three Complementary Trends

™ Data Warehousing: Consolidate data from many

sources in one large repository.
ƒ Loading, periodic synchronization of replicas.
ƒ Semantic integration.
™ OLAP:
ƒ Complex SQL queries and views.
ƒ Queries based on spreadsheet-style operations and
“multidimensional” view of data.
ƒ Interactive and “online” queries.
™ Data Mining: Exploratory search for interesting
trends and anomalies. (Another lecture!)
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 3

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 EXTERNAL DATA
SOURCES

Data Warehousing
™ Integrated data spanning EXTRACT
TRANSFORM
long time periods, often LOAD
augmented with summary REFRESH
information.
™ Several gigabytes to DATA
terabytes common. Metadata WAREHOUSE
Repository
™ Interactive response
times expected for SUPPORTS
complex queries; ad-hoc
updates uncommon. DATA
MINING OLAP
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 4

Warehousing Issues
™ Semantic Integration: When getting data from
multiple sources, must eliminate mismatches,
e.g., different currencies, schemas.
™ Heterogeneous Sources: Must access data from
a variety of source formats and repositories.
ƒ Replication capabilities can be exploited here.
™ Load, Refresh, Purge: Must load data,
periodically refresh it, and purge too-old data.
™ Metadata Management: Must keep track of
source, loading time, and other information for
all data in the warehouse.
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 5
timeid

Multidimensional
locid
sales
pid

Data Model 11 1 1 25
™ Collection of numeric measures, 11 2 1 8
which depend on a set of dimensions. 11 3 1 15
ƒ E.g., measure Sales, dimensions
Product (key: pid), Location (locid),
12 1 1 30
and Time (timeid). 12 2 1 20
12 3 1 50
11 12 13

Slice locid=1 8 10 10
13 1 1 8
pid

is shown: 30 20 50
13 2 1 10
25 8 15
locid 13 3 1 10
1 2 3
timeid
11 1 2 35
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 6

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 MOLAP vs ROLAP
™ Multidimensional data can be stored physically
in a (disk-resident, persistent) array; called
MOLAP systems. Alternatively, can store as a
relation; called ROLAP systems.
™ The main relation, which relates dimensions to
a measure, is called the fact table. Each
dimension can have additional attributes and
an associated dimension table.
ƒ E.g., Products(pid, pname, category, price)
ƒ Fact tables are much larger than dimensional tables.

Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 7

Dimension Hierarchies
™ For each dimension, the set of values can be
organized in a hierarchy:
PRODUCT TIME LOCATION

year

quarter country

category week month state

pname date city

Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 8

OLAP Queries
™ Influenced by SQL and by spreadsheets.
™ A common operation is to aggregate a
measure over one or more dimensions.
ƒ Find total sales.
ƒ Find total sales for each city, or for each state.
ƒ Find top five products ranked by total sales.
™ Roll-up: Aggregating at different levels of a
dimension hierarchy.
ƒ E.g., Given total sales by city, we can roll-up to get
sales by state.

Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 9

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 OLAP Queries
™ Drill-down: The inverse of roll-up.
ƒ E.g., Given total sales by state, can drill-down to get
total sales by city.
ƒ E.g., Can also drill-down on different dimension to
get total sales by product for each state.
™ Pivoting: Aggregation on selected dimensions.
ƒ E.g., Pivoting on Location and Time WI CA Total
yields this cross-tabulation: 1995 63 81 144

™ Slicing and Dicing: Equality 1996 38 107 145

and range selections on one 1997 75 35 110
or more dimensions.
Total 176 223 339
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 10

Comparison with SQL Queries

™ The cross-tabulation obtained by pivoting can also
be computed using a collection of SQLqueries:
SELECT SUM(S.sales)
FROM Sales S, Times T, Locations L
WHERE S.timeid=T.timeid AND S.timeid=L.timeid
GROUP BY T.year, L.state

SELECT SUM(S.sales) SELECT SUM(S.sales)

FROM Sales S, Times T FROM Sales S, Location L
WHERE S.timeid=T.timeid WHERE S.timeid=L.timeid
GROUP BY T.year GROUP BY L.state
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 11

The CUBE Operator

™ Generalizing the previous example, if there
are k dimensions, we have 2^k possible SQL
GROUP BY queries that can be generated
through pivoting on a subset of dimensions.
™ CUBE pid, locid, timeid BY SUM Sales
ƒ Equivalent to rolling up Sales on all eight subsets
of the set {pid, locid, timeid}; each roll-up
corresponds to an SQL query of the form:
SELECT SUM(S.sales)
Lots of work on optimizing FROM Sales S
the CUBE operator! GROUP BY grouping-list
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 12

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 Design Issues TIMES
timeid date week month quarter year holiday_flag

pid timeid locid sales SALES (Fact table)

PRODUCTS LOCATIONS
pid pname category price locid city state country

™ Fact table in BCNF; dimension tables un-normalized.

ƒ Dimension tables are small; updates/inserts/deletes are
rare. So, anomalies less important than query performance.
™ This kind of schema is very common in OLAP
applications, and is called a star schema; computing
the join of all these relations is called a star join.
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 13

Implementation Issues
™ New indexing techniques: Bitmap indexes, Join
indexes, array representations, compression,
precomputation of aggregations, etc.
™ E.g., Bitmap index:
Bit-vector: F sex custid name sex rating rating
1 bit for each M 10 112 Joe M 3 00100
possible value. 115 Ram M 5
Many queries can
10 00001
be answered using 01 119 Sue F 5 00001
bit-vector ops! 10 112 Woo M 4 00010

Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 14

Join Indexes
™ Consider the join of Sales, Products, Times, and
Locations, possibly with additional selection
conditions (e.g., country=“USA”).
ƒ A join index can be constructed to speed up such joins.
The index contains [s,p,t,l] if there are tuples (with sid) s
in Sales, p in Products, t in Times and l in Locations that
satisfy the join (and selection) conditions.
™ Problem: Number of join indexes can grow rapidly.
ƒ A variation addresses this problem: For each column with
an additional selection (e.g., country), build an index with
[c,s] in it if a dimension table tuple with value c in the
selection column joins with a Sales tuple with sid s; if
indexes are bitmaps, called bitmapped join index.
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 15

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 Bitmapped Join Index TIMES

timei dat week mont quarte year holiday_fla

d e h r g
pid timeid locid sales SALES (Fact table)
PRODUCTS LOCATIONS
pid pname category price locid city state country

™ Consider a query with conditions price=10 and

country=“USA”. Suppose tuple (with sid) s in Sales
joins with a tuple p with price=10 and a tuple l with
country =“USA”. There are two join indexes; one
containing [10,s] and the other [USA,s].
™ Intersecting these indexes tells us which tuples in
Sales are in the join and satisfy the given selection.
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 16

Querying Sequences in SQL:1999

™ Trend analysis is difficult to do in SQL-92:
Find the % change in monthly sales
ƒ
Find the top 5 product by total sales
ƒ
Find the trailing n-day moving average of sales
ƒ
The first two queries can be expressed with
ƒ
difficulty, but the third cannot even be expressed
in SQL-92 if n is a parameter of the query.
™ The WINDOW clause in SQL:1999 allows us to
write such queries over a table viewed as a
sequence (implicitly, based on user-specified
sort keys)

Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 17

The WINDOW Clause

SELECT L.state, T.month, AVG(S.sales) OVER W AS movavg
FROM Sales S, Times T, Locations L
WHERE S.timeid=T.timeid AND S.locid=L.locid
WINDOW W AS (PARTITION BY L.state
ORDER BY T.month
RANGE BETWEEN INTERVAL `1’ MONTH PRECEDING
AND INTERVAL `1’ MONTH FOLLOWING)
™ Let the result of the FROM and WHERE clauses be “Temp”.
™ (Conceptually) Temp is partitioned according to the PARTITION BY clause.
ƒ Similar to GROUP BY, but the answer has one row for each row in a partition, not
one row per partition!
™ Each partition is sorted according to the ORDER BY clause.
™ For each row in a partition, the WINDOW clause creates a “window” of
nearby (preceding or succeeding) tuples.
ƒ Can be value-based, as in example, using RANGE
ƒ Can be based on number of rows to include in the window, using ROWS clause
™ The aggregate function is evaluated for each row in the partition using the
corresponding window.
ƒ New aggregate functions that are useful with windowing include RANK (position
of a row within its partition) and its variants DENSE_RANK, PERCENT_RANK,
CUME_DIST.
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 18

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 Top N Queries
™ If you want to find the 10 (or so) cheapest
cars, it would be nice if the DB could avoid
computing the costs of all cars before sorting
to determine the 10 cheapest.
ƒ Idea: Guess at a cost c such that the 10 cheapest all
cost less than c, and that not too many more cost
less. Then add the selection cost<c and evaluate
the query.
• If the guess is right, great, we avoid
computation for cars that cost more than c.
• If the guess is wrong, need to reset the selection
and recompute the original query.
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 19

Top N Queries
SELECT P.pid, P.pname, S.sales
FROM Sales S, Products P
WHERE S.pid=P.pid AND S.locid=1 AND S.timeid=3
ORDER BY S.sales DESC
OPTIMIZE FOR 10 ROWS

SELECT P.pid, P.pname, S.sales

FROM Sales S, Products P
WHERE S.pid=P.pid AND S.locid=1 AND S.timeid=3
AND S.sales > c
ORDER BY S.sales DESC

™ OPTIMIZE FOR construct is not in SQL:1999!

™ Cut-off value c is chosen by optimizer.
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 20

Online Aggregation
™ Consider an aggregate query, e.g., finding the
average sales by state. Can we provide the user
with some information before the exact average is
computed for all states?
ƒ Can show the current “running average” for each state
as the computation proceeds.
ƒ Even better, if we use statistical techniques and sample
tuples to aggregate instead of simply scanning the
aggregated table, we can provide bounds such as “the
average for Wisconsin is 2000±102 with 95%
probability.
• Should also use nonblocking algorithms!
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 21

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 Summary
™ Decision support is an emerging, rapidly
growing subarea of databases.
™ Involves the creation of large, consolidated
data repositories called data warehouses.
™ Warehouses exploited using sophisticated
analysis techniques: complex SQL queries
and OLAP “multidimensional” queries
(influenced by both SQL and spreadsheets).
™ New techniques for database design,
indexing, view maintenance, and interactive
querying need to be supported.
Database Management Systems, 2nd Edition. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke 22