Abstract
A flurry of buzzwords awaits anyone investigating database technology for decision support: data warehouse, multidimensional and dimensional database, on-line analytical processing, star schema, slicing, dicing, drill-down and roll-up. We introduce the area via an example based on a long-ago project to design a repository on energy information for the US Department of Energy. Once we have introduced some terminology, we explore research issues associated with decision-support databases, including representation, modeling, metadata, architectures and query processing. The purpose of this paper is to provide researchers with the background they need to contribute to this area.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ballinger, C. and Olson, M. (1997). High Noon for TPC-D, Database Programming and Design.
Billings, K. (1997). Bottom-up Optimization of TPC-D. Master's Thesis, Portland State University Computer Science Department, in preparation. http://www.cs.pdx.edu/»kgb/t/title.html.
Bulos, D. (1996). OLAP Database Design: A New Dimension, Database Programming and Design, 33–37.
Chaudhuri, S., Krishnamurthy, R., Potamianos, S., and Shim, K. (1995). Optimizing queries with materialized views. Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Data Engineering (pp. 190–200).
Chaudhuri, S. and Shim, K. (1995). An Overview of Cost-Based Optimization of Queries with Aggregates, Data Engineering, 18(3).
Codd, E.F. and Codd, S.B. (1994). OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing). White Paper, E.F. Codd & Associates.
Croteau, K., Heller, J., Krawiec, T., Maier D., and Russell, B. (1979a). The Conceptual Model for EEMIS. Dept. of Computer Science, SUNY Stony Brook.
Croteau, K., Heller, J., Krawiec, T., Maier, D., Russell, B., and Wolk, P. (1979b). Final Report: The Conceptual Model for EEMIS. Dept. of Computer Science, SUNY Stony Brook.
Croteau, K., Kydes, A.S., and Maier, D. (1979c). EEMIS Data Sector Correspondence with Conceptual Database Design. Brookhaven National Laboratory Report BNL 51091.
D'Acierno, J., Hermelee, A., Frederickson, C.P., and Van Valkenburg, K. (1979). Methodology for Coding the Energy Emergency Management Information System, Brookhaven National Laboratory Report BNL 51086.
Demarest, M. (1994). Building the Data Mart, DBMS.
Finkelstein, R. (1995). MDD: Database Reaches the Next Dimension, Database Programming & Design, 8(4).
Frank, M. (1994). A Drill-Down Analysis of Dimensional Databases, DBMS.
Ghandeharizadeh, S., DeWitt, D., and Qureshi, W. (1992). Performance analysis of alternative multi-attribute declustering strategies. Proc. ACM SIGMOD Conf. (p. 29). San Diego, CA.
Gray, J., Bosworth, A., Layman, A., and Pirahesh, H. (1996). Data cube: A relational aggregation operator generalizing group-by, cross-tab and sub-totals. Proc. Twelfth Intl. Conf. on Data Engineering. New Orleans, LA: EEE.
Hammer, J., Garcia-Molina, H., Widom, J., Labio, W., and Zhuge, Y. (1995). The Stanford Data Warehouse Project. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin (Special Issue on Materialized Views and Data Warehousing), 18(2), 41–48.
Harinarayan, V., Rajaraman, A., and Ullman, J.D. (1996). Implementing data cubes efficiently. Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD Intl. Conf. on Management of Data.
Kenan Technologies. (1994). An Introduction to Dimensional Database Technology, Cambridge, MA: Kenan Systems Corporation.http://www.ultranet.com/»kenan/acumate/mddb.htm
Kimball, R. (1996). The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Wiley.
Kimball, R. and Strehlo, K. (1995). Why Decision Support Fails and How to Fix it, ACMSIGMOD Record, 24(3).
Lenz, H. and Shoshani, A. (1997). Summarizability in OLAP and Statistical Databases. Statistical and Scientific Database Management, Olympia, Washington, USA.
Madsen, M. (1997). Warehouse Design in the Aggregate, Database Programming and Design, 9(7).
Maier, D., Meredith, M.E., and Shapiro, L. (1996). Bringing Knowledge to Bear: Challenges for Decision Support Makers. Multimedia, Knowledge-Based & Object Oriented Databases, Springer-Verlag.
Meredith, M. and Khader, A. (1996). Divide and Aggregate: Designing Large Warehouses. Database Programming and Design, http://www.dbpd.com/khader.htm
Mumick, I.S. and Gupta, A. (1996). Workshop on Materialized Views: Techniques and Applications, following SIGMOD'96.
O'Neil, P.E. (1987). Model 204 Architecture and Performance. Second Annual Workshop on High Performance Transaction Systems. Springer-Verlag LNCS, 359, 40–57.
Rafanelli, M. and Shoshani, A. (1990). STORM: A statistical object representation model. Proceedings of 5th International Conference SSDBM. Charlotte, NC. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 420, Springer.
Red Brick Systems. (1995). The Data Warehouse: The Competitive Advantage for the 1990's. White paper, Los Gatos, CA.
Salzberg, B. and Reuter, A. (1995). Indexing for aggregation. Unpublished memorandum, College of Computer Science, Northwestern University.
Shoshani, A. (1995). OLAP and statistical databases: Similarities and differences. ACM SIGMOD Intl. Conf. on Management of Data. San Jose.
Squire, C. (1995/1997). Data extraction and transformation for the data warehouse. Proc. ACM SIGMOD. Intl. Conf. on Management of Data, San Jose, PODS, Tucson (pp. 195–196).
Stacey, D. (1994/1995). Replication: DB2, Oracle or Sybase, Database Programming and Design, 7(12). Reprinted in SIGMOD Record, 24(4).
Thé, L. (1995). OLAP Answers Tough Business Questions, Datamation.
Wong, H., Li, J., Olken, F., Rotem, D., and Wong, L. (1986). Bit Transposition for Very Large Scientific and Statistical Databases, Algorithmica, 1(3), 289–309.
Wong, H., Liu, H., Olken, F., Rotem, D., and Wong, L. (1985). Bit transposed Files. Proc. Conf. on Very Large Databases (pp.448–457).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Maier, D., Meredith, M.E. & Shapiro, L. Selected Research Issues in Decision Support Databases. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 11, 169–191 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008627001818
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008627001818