Synonyms
Numerical fact
Definition
A measure is a numerical property of a multidimensional cube, e.g., sales price, coupled with an aggregation formula, e.g., SUM. It captures numerical information to be used for aggregate computations.
Key Points
As an example, a three-dimensional cube for capturing sales may have a Product dimension P, a Time dimension T, and a Store dimension S, capturing the product sold, the time of sale, and the store it was sold in, for each sale, respectively. The cube has two measures: DollarSales and ItemSales, capturing the sales price and the number of items sold, respectively. ItemSales can be viewed as a function: ItemSales: Dom(P) × Dom(T) × Dom(S) ↦ ℕ0 that given a certain combination of dimension values returns the total number of items sold for that combination. If a dimension value corresponds to a higher level in the dimension hierarchy, e.g., a product group or even all products, the result is an aggregation of several lower-level measure values [2]....
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Gray J, Chaudhuri S, Bosworth A, Layman A, Reichart D, Venkatrao M, Pellow F, Pirahesh H. Data cube: a relational aggregation operator generalizing group-by, cross-tab, and sub totals. Data Min Knowl Discov. 1997;1(1):29–53.
Jensen CS, Pedersen TB, Thomsen C. Multidimensional databases and data warehousing, Synthesis lectures on data management. San Rafael: Morgan Claypool; 2010.
Kimball R, Ross M, Thornthwaite W, Mundy J, Becker B. The data warehouse lifecycle toolkit. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Wiley; 2008.
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Pedersen, T.B. (2018). Measure. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_885
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