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Multidimensional Modeling

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

  • 52 Accesses

Synonyms

Dimensional modeling; Star schema modeling

Definition

Multidimensional modeling is the process of modeling the data in a universe of discourse using the modeling constructs provided by the multidimensional data model. Briefly, the multidimensional data model categorizes data as being either facts with associated numerical measures or as being dimensions that characterize the facts and are mostly textual. For example, in a retail business, products are sold to customers at certain times in certain amounts and at certain prices. A typical fact would be a purchase. Typical measures would be the amount and price of the purchase. Typical dimensions would be the location of the purchase, the type of product being purchased, and the time of the purchase. Queries then aggregate measure values over ranges of dimension values to produce results such as the total sales per month and product type.

More precisely, a number of different formal multidimensional data models have been proposed...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Torben Bach Pedersen

Authors
  1. Torben Bach Pedersen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Torben Bach Pedersen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Torben Bach Pedersen

  2. DISI, Univ. of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Stefano Rizzi

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Pedersen, T.B. (2018). Multidimensional Modeling. 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_229

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