Understanding

Multi Dimensional Database

Prepared By
Amit Sharma
Hyperion/OBIEE Trainer
learnhyperion.wordpress.com
Aloo_a2@yahoo.com

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 Review

 Architecture
 Characteristics
 Relational OLAP
 Multidimensional OLAP
 ROLAP VS. MOLAP

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 Today
Star Schema
Fact table
Dimensions
Drilling Down & Roll up
Slicing & Dicing

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 Fact
Definition : Facts are numeric measurements (values) that
represent a specific business activity.
Facts are stored in a FACT table I.e. the center of the
star schema.
Facts are used in business data analysis, are units,
cost, prices and revenues
Example: sales figures are numeric measurements that
represent product and/or service sales.
.

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 Fact Table
Central table
Mostly raw numeric items
Narrow rows, a few columns at most
Large number of rows (millions to a billion)
Access via dimensions

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 Fact Table

Definition :The centralized table in a star schema is

called as FACT table, that contains facts and connected
to dimensions. A fact table typically has two types of
columns:
 Contain facts and
 Foreign keys to dimension tables.
The primary key of a fact table is usually a composite key
that is made up of all of its foreign keys.
A fact table might contain either detail level facts
or facts that have been aggregated (fact tables that
contain aggregated facts are often instead called
summary tables). A fact table usually contains facts
with the same level of aggregation.

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 Dimension

Definition : Qualifying characteristics that provide

additional perspective to a given fact.
Example: sales might be compared by product from region
to region and from one time period to the next.
Here sales have product, location and time dimensions.
Such dimensions are stored in DIMENSIONAL TABLE.

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 Dimension Tables

Definition: The dimensions of the fact table are further

described with dimension tables
Fact table:
Sales (Market_id, Product_Id, Time_Id,
Sales_Amt)
Dimension Tables:
Market (Market_Id, City, State, Region)
Product (Product_Id, Name, Category, Price)
Time (Time_Id, Week, Month, Quarter)

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 What is Star Schema?
Definition: Star Schema is a relational database schema
for representing multidimensional data. It is the
simplest form of data warehouse schema that contains one
or more dimensions and fact tables.
It is called a star schema because the entity-
relationship diagram between dimensions and fact tables
resembles a star where one fact table is connected to
multiple dimensions.
The center of the star schema consists of a large
fact table and it points towards the dimension tables.
The advantage of star schema are slicing down, performance
increase and easy understanding of data.

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 Steps in designing Star Schema
 Identify a business process for analysis(like sales).
 Identify measures or facts (sales dollar).
 Identify dimensions for facts(product dimension, location
dimension, time dimension, organization dimension).
 List the columns that describe each dimension.(region name,
branch name, region name).
 Determine the lowest level of summary in a fact table(sales
dollar).
 In a star schema every dimension will have a primary key.
 In a star schema, a dimension table will not have any parent
table.
Whereas in a snow flake schema, a dimension table will have one
or more parent tables.
 Hierarchies for the dimensions are stored in the dimensional
table itself in star schema.
 Whereas hierarchies are broken into separate tables in snow
flake schema. These hierarchies helps to drill down the data
from topmost hierarchies to the lowermost hierarchies.

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 Attributes
Each dimension table contain attributes.
Used to search, filter and classify facts.
Example, Sales, we can identify some attributes for each
dimension:
Product Dimension: product ID, description, product
type
Location Dimension: region, state, city.
Time Dimension: year quarter, month, week and date.

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 Attributes Hierarchy
Definition : AH provides a top-down data organization
Used for aggregation and drill-down/roll-up data analysis.
Example, location dimension attributes can be organized in a
hierarchy by region, state and city.
AH provides the capability to perform drill-down and roll-up
searches.
Allows the DW and OLAP systems to to have defined path.

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 A Concept Hierarchy: Dimension (location)

all all

region Europe ... North_America

country Germany ... Spain Canada ... Mexico

city Frankfurt ... Vancouver ... Toronto

office L. Chan ... M. Wind

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 A Concept Hierarchy: Dimension (location)
Product Line Product Family Product Product Name
Category

Books Arts and Music Architecture High Top Almonds

Books Audiobooks Biographies Wild Swans: Three

Daughters of China

Books Audiobooks Childrens The Hobbit

Books Audiobooks Childrens Winnie The Pooh

Books Audiobooks Fiction The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn

Product_Line->Product_Family->Product_Category->Product_Name

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 Multidimensional
Data
Sales volume as a function of product, month,
and region
Dimensions: Product, Location, Time
Hierarchical summarization paths
on
gi

Industry Region Year

Re

Category Country Quarter

Product

Product City Month Week

Office Day

Month
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 A Sample Data Cube

Total annual sales

Date of TV in U.S.A.
1Qtr 2Qtr 3Qtr 4Qtr sum
t
uc

TV
od

PC U.S.A
Pr

VCR

Country
sum
Canada

Mexico

sum

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 A Sample Data Cube
Total annual sales
t
uc

Country
Date of TV in U.S.A.
od

TV1Qtr2Qtr3Qtr 4Qtr sum

Pr

PC U.S.A
VCR
sum Canada
Mexico
sum
Essbase
Sales Manager Qtr1 Qtr2 Qtr3 Qtr4
Sales Sales Sales Sales
John New York 1000 1000 1000 1000
California 200 200 200 200
Texas 63446 63446 63446 63446
Ohio 6633 6633 6633 6633
Illnois 3466 3466 3466 3466
Qtr1 Qtr2 Qtr3 Qtr4
Mac New York
California
Texas
Ohio 300
Illnois

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 Star Schema
A single fact table and for each dimension
one dimension table
Does not capture hierarchies directly

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 Example of Star Schema: Figure 1.6

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 In the example, sales fact table is connected to
dimensions location, product, time and organization. It
shows that data can be sliced across all dimensions and
again it is possible for the data to be aggregated
across multiple dimensions. "Sales dollar" in sales fact
table can be calculated across all dimensions
independently or in a combined manner which is explained
below.

 Sales dollar value for a particular product

 Sales dollar value for a product in a location
 Sales dollar value for a product in a year within a
location
 Sales dollar value for a product in a year within a
location sold or serviced by an employee

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 Example of Star Schema

time
time_key item
day item_key
day_of_the_week Sales Fact Table item_name
month brand
quarter time_key type
year supplier_type
item_key
branch_key
branch location
location_key
branch_key location_key
branch_name units_sold street
branch_type city
dollars_sold province_or_street
country
avg_sales
Measures

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 Aggregation
Many OLAP queries involve aggregation of the data in the fact
table

For example, to find the total sales (over time) of each product
in each market, we might use

SELECT S.Market_Id, S.Product_Id, SUM

(S.Sales_Amt)
FROM Sales S
GROUP BY S.Market_Id, S.Product_Id

The aggregation is over the entire time dimension and thus

produces a two-dimensional view of the data

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 Aggregation Over Time

The output of the previous query

Market_Id
SUM(Sales_Amt) M1 M2 M3 M4
Product_Id

P1 3003 1503 …

P2 6003 2402 …

P3 4503 3 …

P4 7503 7000 …

P5 … … …

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 Typical OLAP
Operations
Roll up (drill-up): summarize data
by climbing up hierarchy or by dimension reduction
Drill down (roll down): reverse of roll-up
from higher level summary to lower level summary or
detailed data, or introducing new dimensions
Slice and dice:
project and select
Pivot (rotate):
reorient the cube, visualization, 3D to series of 2D
planes.
Other operations
drill across: involving (across) more than one fact
table
drill through: through the bottom level of the cube to
its back-end relational tables (using SQL)

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 Drilling Down and Rolling
Up

Some dimension tables form an aggregation hierarchy

Market_Id → City → State → Region
Executing a series of queries that moves down a hierarchy
(e.g., from aggregation over regions to that over states) is
called drilling down
Requires the use of the fact table or information more
specific than the requested aggregation (e.g., cities)
Executing a series of queries that moves up the hierarchy
(e.g., from states to regions) is called rolling up

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 Drilling Down

Drilling down on market: from Region to State

Sales (Market_Id, Product_Id, Time_Id, Sales_Amt)
Market (Market_Id, City, State, Region)

SELECT S.Product_Id, M.Region, SUM (S.Sales_Amt)

FROM Sales S, Market M
WHERE M.Market_Id = S.Market_Id
GROUP BY S.Product_Id, M.Region

SELECT S.Product_Id, M.State, SUM (S.Sales_Amt)

FROM Sales S, Market M
WHERE M.Market_Id = S.Market_Id
GROUP BY S.Product_Id, M.State,

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 Rolling Up
Rolling up on market, from State to Region
If we have already created a table, State_Sales,
using

1. SELECT S.Product_Id, M.State, SUM

(S.Sales_Amt)
FROM Sales S, Market M
WHERE M.Market_Id = S.Market_Id
GROUP BY S.Product_Id, M.State
then we can roll up from there to:

2. SELECT T.Product_Id, M.Region, SUM

(T.Sales_Amt)
FROM State_Sales T, Market M
WHERE M.State = T.State
GROUP BY T.Product_Id, M.Region

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 Roll-up and Drill Down

Higher Level of
Aggregation
Sales Channel

Drill-Down
Region
Country
Roll Up

State
Location Address
Sales Representative

Low-level
Details
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 “Slicing and Dicing”

The Telecomm Slice

Product

Household

Telecomm n s
io
eg Europe
Video R
Far East
Audio India

Retail Direct Special Sales Channel

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 Snowflake Schema
A snowflake schema is a term that describes a star
schema structure normalized through the use of outrigger
tables. i.e dimension table hierarchies are broken into
simpler tables. In star schema example we had 4
dimensions like location, product, time, organization
and a fact table (sales)

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 Snowflake schema
Represent dimensional hierarchy directly by normalizing
tables.
Easy to maintain and saves storage

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 Example of Snowflake Schema

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 Example of Snowflake Schema

time
time_key item
day item_key supplier
day_of_the_week Sales Fact Table item_name supplier_key
month brand supplier_type
quarter time_key type
year item_key supplier_key

branch_key
location
branch location_key
location_key
branch_key
units_sold street
branch_name
city_key city
branch_type
dollars_sold
city_key
avg_sales city
province_or_street
Measures country

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 Questions??

Prepared By
Amit Sharma
Hyperion/OBIEE Trainer
learnhyperion.wordpress.com
Aloo_a2@yahoo.com

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