Data Mining & Data

Warehousing
18CS641

Pavan Kumar SP
VVCE MYSURU
 Data Mining & Data Warehousing

Module 1 - Data Warehousing & modeling

1. Data Warehousing: Basic Concepts
1.1. What Is a Data Warehouse?
1.2. Differences between Operational Database Systems and Data Warehouses
1.3. But, Why Have a Separate Data Warehouse?
1.4. Data Warehousing: A Multitiered Architecture
1.5. Data Warehouse Models: Enterprise Warehouse, Data Mart, and Virtual Warehouse
1.6. Extraction, Transformation, and loading
2. Data Warehouse Modelling: Data Cube and OLAP
2.1. Data Cube: A multidimensional data model
2.2. Stars, Snowflakes, and Fact constellations: Schemas for multidimensional Data
models
2.3. Dimensions: The role of concept Hierarchies
2.4. Measures: Their Categorization and computation
2.5. Typical OLAP Operations

What is a Data Warehouse?

Definition: “Data Warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and non-

volatile collection of data in support of management’s decision-making process” -
William H. Inmon

• It provides architectures and tools for business executives to systematically

organize, understand, and use their data to make strategic decisions.
• It is a data repository maintained separately from an organization’s operational
databases.
• It allows for the integration of a variety of application systems.
• It supports information processing by providing a solid platform of consolidated
historical data for analysis
• It is also often viewed as an architecture constructed by integrating data from
multiple heterogeneous sources to support structured and ad hoc queries,
analytical reporting, and decision making
• Data warehouses can store and integrate historical information and support
complex multidimensional queries.

key features of Data Warehouse are:

a. Subject oriented
b. Integrated
c. Time -variant
d. Non-volatile

Subject oriented

• Data warehouse is organized around significant subjects such as customer, supplier,

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product, and sales rather than day to day transaction

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• It only focuses on modeling and analysis of data for decision-makers (subjects)

• It provides a concise view of a particular subject issue, which is helpful for the
decision-making process

Integrated

• A data warehouse is usually constructed by integrating multiple heterogeneous such

as relational databases, flat files, and online transaction records.
• Data cleaning and integration techniques ensure consistency in naming conventions,
encoding structures, and attribute measures.

Time-Variant

• Data is stored to provide information from a historical perspective (e.g., the past 5–
10 years).
• Every key structure in the data warehouse contains a time element, either implicitly
or explicitly.

Non-volatile:

• A data warehouse is always a physically separate store of data transformed from the
application data found in the operational environment.
• Due to this separation, a data warehouse does not require transaction processing,
recovery, and concurrency control mechanisms.
• It usually requires only two operations in data accessing: initial loading and access of
data.

The construction of a data warehouse requires (Steps)

a. Data cleaning
b. Data integration
c. Data consolidation

How are organizations using the information from data warehouses?

Organizations use the data warehouse information for decision-making activities as follows.

1. Increasing customer focus – Analysis of customer buying patterns

2. Repositioning of products / Managing product portfolios – Comparing the sales by
quarter/Year, by locations to fine-tune the production strategies.
3. Analysing operations and looking for sources of profit
4. Managing customer relationships, making environmental corrections, and managing
the cost of corporate assets.
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Heterogeneous database integration

• Organizations typically collects diverse kind of data,

• It maintains an extensive database from multiple, heterogeneous, autonomous,
distributed information sources.
• The collected data is desirable and challenging to integrate.

Query-driven approach- Traditional approach to handle the heterogeneous database

integration

The traditional database approach to heterogeneous database integration is to build

wrappers and integrators (or mediators) on top of multiple, heterogeneous databases.

When a query is posed to a client site

1. Metadata dictionary translates the query into queries appropriate for the individual
heterogeneous sites involved.
2. Queries are then mapped and sent to local query processors
3. The results from the different sites are integrated into a global answer set.

The drawback of the traditional approach

• This query-driven approach requires complex information filtering and integration

processes and competes with local sites for processing resources.
• It is inefficient and potentially expensive for frequent queries, especially queries
requiring aggregations.

Update driven approach

• Information from multiple, heterogeneous sources is integrated in advance and

stored in a warehouse for direct querying and analysis.
• Data are copied, pre-processed, integrated, annotated, summarized, and
restructured into one semantic datastore. Unlike online transaction processing
databases, data warehouses do not contain the most current information.
• Query processing in data warehouses does not interfere with the processing at local
sources.

Differences between Operational Database Systems and Data Warehouses

Operational Database System Data warehouse
is to perform an online transaction Serve users or knowledge
Major task and query processing workers in the role of data
analysis and decision making.
Online transaction processing Online analytical processing
Called as (OLTP) systems (OLAP) systems
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System OLTP system is customer-oriented OLAP system is market-oriented

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orientation

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Used for Transaction and query processing Data analysis

clerks, clients knowledge workers, managers,
Users
executives, and analysts
It manages current data that, It manages large amounts of
typically, are too detailed to be historical data and provides
Data contents
easily used for decision making. facilities for summarization and
aggregation.
Usually adopts an entity-relationship Usually adopts a star or a
Database (ER) data snowflake model and a subject-
design model and an application-oriented oriented
database design database design
• It focuses mainly on the current • It will focus on historical data
data within an enterprise or • It deals with information from
View department different organizations,
integrating information from
many data stores.
• Consist mainly of short, atomic • OLAP systems are mostly
transactions. read-only operations
Access
• Such a system requires
patterns
concurrency control and recovery
mechanisms

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Why Have a Separate Data Warehouse?

• This separation is to help promote the high performance of both systems
• Operational database is designed to have workloads like indexing and hashing using
primary keys, searching for records, and optimizing “canned” queries
• Data warehouse queries are often complex and involve the computation of large
data groups at summarized levels.
• Processing OLAP queries in operational databases would substantially degrade the
performance of operational tasks.
• Operational database supports the concurrent processing of multiple transactions.
• Concurrency control and recovery mechanisms are required to ensure the
consistency and robustness of transactions.
• An OLAP query often needs read-only access to data records for summarization and
aggregation.
• Concurrency control and recovery mechanisms may reduce the throughput of an
OLTP system if applied for such OLAP operations.
• Operational databases do not typically maintain historical data
• Decision support requires consolidation (e.g., aggregation and summarization) of
data from heterogeneous sources, resulting in high-quality, clean, integrated data.
• In contrast, operational databases contain only detailed raw data, such as
transactions, which need to be consolidated before analysis

Data Warehousing: A Multitiered Architecture

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Bottom tier

• Back-end tools and utilities feed data from operational databases or other external
sources into the bottom tier.
• These tools and utilities perform data extraction, cleaning, transformation, and load
and refresh functions to update the data warehouse.
• The data are extracted using application program interfaces known as gateways.
• A gateway is supported by the underlying DBMS and allows client programs to
generate SQL code to be executed at a server.
• This tier also contains a metadata repository, which stores information about the
data warehouse and its contents.
Middle tier
• is an OLAP server typically implemented using either a relational OLAP(ROLAP) or
multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) models.
• ROLAP- an extended relational DBMS that maps operations on multidimensional
data to standard relational operations.
• MOLAP -special-purpose server that directly implements multidimensional data and
operations.
Top tier
• It is a front-end client layer that contains query and reporting tools, analysis tools,
and data mining tools

Data Warehouse Models

From the architectural point of view, there are three Data Warehouse Models
a. Enterprise Warehouse
b. Data mart
c. Virtual warehouse

Enterprise Warehouse
• it collects all information about subjects spanning the entire organization
• it provides corporate-wide integration (from one are more operational system/external
information providers)
• it contains both detailed and summarized data
• size of the data varies from hundreds of gigabytes (GB) to terabytes (TB)
• it can be implemented in traditional mainframe computers/ computer Super servers
/Parallel architecture platforms.
• it requires extensive business modeling
• implementation cycle is measured in years
Datamart
• it contains a subset of corporate-wide data
• the scope is confined to some specific selected subjects
• low-cost departmental servers usually implement its
• implementation cycle is measured in weeks
• if it’s design and planning are not enterprise-wide, in the long run, we should involve a
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complex integration process

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• Depending on data sources, the data mart is categorized into dependent and independent.

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• If the data is sourced from one or more operational system /external information providers,
we can call the data mart an independent data mart
• If the data is sourced directly from the enterprise data warehouse, we can use the data mart
as a dependent data mart.

Virtual warehouse
• It is a set of views over an operational database
• For efficient query processing, only some of the possible summary views may be
materialized
• It is easy to build, but it requires excess capacity on the operational database server

What are the pros and cons of the top-down and bottom-up approaches to data
warehouse development?
Top-down approach Bottom-up approach
• It is a systematic solution • Design and development of
• it minimizes the integration problem independent data marts provide
Pros flexibility
• Low cost
• Rapid return on investment
• it is expensive • it may lead to problems while
• it takes a long time to develop integrating various disparate data
Cons
• lack of flexibility marts into the consistent data
warehouse

The recommended method for the development of data warehouse systems

• Implement the warehouse incrementally and evolutionarily, as shown in the below

figure.

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Step1

• Define a high-level corporate data model within a short period

• This data model provides a corporate-wide, integrated, and consistent view of
subjects and potential usages.
• We need to refine this model further to reduce future integration problems.
Step2

• Independent data marts can be implemented in parallel with the enterprise

warehouse based on the same corporate data model set noted before
Step 3

• Distributed data marts can be constructed to integrate different data marts via hub
servers
Step 4

• Finally, a multitier data warehouse is constructed where the enterprise warehouse is

the sole custodian of all warehouse data, which is then distributed to the various
dependent data marts

Extraction, Transformation, and Loading

• Data warehouses use back-end tools and utilities to extract and refresh their data.
• The flowing are the functionalities of tools and utilities
1. Data Extraction – gathers data from external and multiple resources
2. Dara Cleaning -it detects errors and noise in the data and rectifies them when
possible
3. Data Transformation – converts data from host format to warehouse format
4. Load -sorts, summarizes, consolidates, computes views, checks the integrity, and
builds indices and partitions
5. Refresh – which propagates the updates from the data source to the warehouse
Metadata Repository

• Metadata is data about data

• It defines warehouse objects /data names /definition
• Additional metadata are created and captured
a. For time stamping any extracted data
b. Source of the extracted data
c. Missing fields that have been added by the data clean and integration process
• Metadata is used as a directory to help the decision support system analyst locate
the contents of the data warehouse
• It is used to guide the data mapping when data are transformed from the
operational environment to the data warehouse environment.
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• Metadata also guides the algorithms used to summarize the current detailed data
and the lightly summarized data, and between the lightly summarized data and the
highly summarized data.
• Metadata should be stored and managed persistently
A metadata repository should contain the following

Which includes
a. Warehouse schema view
Description of Datawarehouse b. Dimensions
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structure c. Hierarchies
d. Derived data definitions
e. Data marts location and contents
This includes
a. Data lineage- data migration and
transformation
2 Operational Metadata
b. Currency of data-active, archived -purged
c. Monitoring Information -statistics, error
reports, audit trails
Which includes
a. Measure and dimension definition algorithms
b. Data on granularity
The algorithm used for
3 c. Partitions
summarization
d. Subject areas,
e. Aggregation
f. Predefined quarries and reports
which includes
a. Source databases and their contents
b. gateway descriptions
Mapping from the operational
c. data partitions/extraction/cleaning/
4 environment to the data
transformation rules
warehouse
d. data refresh and purging rules,
e. Security (user authorization and access
control).
which include
a. indices and profiles that improve data access
Data related to system
5 and retrieval performance
performance
b. Rules for the timing and scheduling of refresh,
update, and replication cycles
which include
a. Business terms and definitions
6 Business metadata
b. data ownership information,
c. charging policies
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Data Cube: A multi-Dimensional Data model

• A-Data cube allows data to be modeled and viewed in multiple dimensions.
• It is defined by dimensions and facts
• Dimensions – are the perspectives/entities concerning which an organization wants
to keep the records
Example
Organization: AllElectronics
Warehouse: Sales data Warehouse
Dimensions: time, item, branch, and location.
• These dimensions allow the store to keep track of things like monthly sales of items
and the branches and locations at which the items were sold.
• Each dimension may have a table associated with it, called a dimension table, as
shown in the below figure

Dimensions
Time Item Branch location

Dimension table
Item_name Brand Type

• A multidimensional data model is typically organized around a central theme, such

as sales
• A fact table represents this theme.
• Facts are numeric measures.
Example
Organization: AllElectronics
Warehouse: Sales data Warehouse
Dimensions: time, item, branch, and location
Theme: Sales
Facts: Dollor_sold and Unit_sold

• The fact table contains the names of the facts measures and keys to each of the
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related dimension tables.

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Example for Two-Dimensional Data Model

Dimensions: Item and Time

Facts: Home Entertainment, Computer, Phone, Security, Q1 to Q4
Measure:
605 825 14 400
680 952 31 512
812 1023 30 501
927 1038 38 580

• We will look at the AllElectronics sales data for items sold per quarter in the city of
Vancouver.
• In this 2-D representation, the sales for Vancouver are shown concerning the time
dimension (organized in quarters) and the item dimension (classified to the types of
items sold).
• The fact or measure displayed is dollars sold (in thousands).

Example for Three-Dimensional Data Model

• Suppose we would like to view the data according to time and item, and location for
the cities Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Dimensions: Item and Time, Location

Facts: Home Entertainment, Computer, Phone, Security, Q1 to Q4, the cities Chicago, New
York, Toronto, and Vancouver

• The 3-D data in the table are represented as a series of 2-D tables
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Conceptually, we may also represent the same data in a 3-D data cube, as shown below.

Example for Four-Dimensional Data Model

• Suppose that we would now like to view our sales data with an additional fourth
dimension, such as a supplier.
• Viewing things in 4-D becomes tricky. However, we can think of a 4-D cube as being a
series of 3-D cubes, as shown in the below figure

Dimensions: Item and Time, Location, Supplier

Facts: Home Entertainment, Computer, Phone, Security, Q1 to Q4, the cities Chicago, New
York, Toronto, and Vancouver, Sup1, Sup2, Sup3
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• We can have different degrees of summarization with different data dimensions

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• Given a set of dimensions, we can generate a cuboid for each of the possible subsets
of the given dimensions.
• The result would form a lattice of cuboids, each showing the data at a different level
of summarization or group-by.
• The lattice of cuboids is then referred to as a data cube
• The cuboid that holds the lowest level of summarization is called the base cuboid
• The 0-D cuboid, which holds the highest level of summarization, is called the apex
cuboid.

Schemas for Multidimensional Data Models

• A data warehouse requires a concise subject-oriented schema that facilitates online

data analysis
• The most popular schemas of the data warehouses are
1. Star schema
2. Snowflake schema
3. Fact constellation schema

Star Schema
In a star schema, the data warehouse contains
1. Fact Table - a large central table containing the bulk of the data, with no redundancy
2. Dimension tables- a set of smaller attendant tables, one for each dimension
The schema graph resembles a starburst, with the dimension tables displayed in a radial
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pattern around the central fact table.

Example
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Data warehouse: AllElectronics sales

Dimensions: time, item, branch, and location
Central fact table for sales: contains keys to each of the four dimensions along with two
measures: dollars sold and units sold
Advantages

• Simplest and Easiest

• Optimises the navigation through the database
• Most suitable for query processing
Disadvantage
• few constraints may introduce redundancy

Snowflake schema
• The snowflake schema is a variant of the star schema model
• some of the dimension tables are normalized by splitting the data into additional
tables.
• The resulting schema graph forms a shape like a snowflake
• The snowflake model may be kept in the normalized form to reduce redundancies
• Snowflake structure can reduce the effectiveness of browsing since more joins will
be needed to execute a query

Example

Warehouse: AllElectronics sales

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• The single dimension table for items in the star schema is normalized in the
snowflake schema, resulting in new item and supplier tables
• the item dimension table now contains the attributes item key, item name, brand,
type, and supplier key,
• where supplier key is linked to the supplier dimension table, containing supplier key
and supplier type information.
• Similarly, the single dimension table for location in the star schema can be
normalized into two new tables: area and city.
• The city key in the new location table links to the city dimension

Fact constellation:
• Sophisticated applications may require multiple fact tables to share dimension
tables.
• This kind of schema can be viewed as a collection of stars and hence is called a
galaxy schema or a fact constellation
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Example

• This schema specifies two fact tables, sales, and shipping.

• The sales table definition is identical to that of the star schema
• The shipping table has five dimensions, or keys—item key, time key, shipper key,
from location, and to location—and two measures—dollars cost and units shipped
• A fact constellation schema allows dimension tables to be shared between fact
tables.
• The dimensions tables for time, item, and location are shared between the sales and
shipping fact tables
Note
1. For data warehouses, the fact constellation schema is commonly used.
2. For data marts, the star or snowflake schema is commonly used
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Dimensions: The Role of Concept Hierarchies

Concept Hierarchies
• It defines a sequence of mappings from a set of low-level concepts to higher-level,
more general concepts
Example
Dimension: Location
Fact: City
Values: Vancouver, Toronto, New York, and Chicago

• Each city can be mapped to its respective state /province

Example
Vancouver can be mapped to British Columbia
• Each province and state can, in turn, be mapped to the country
Example
British Columbia mapped to Canada
• These mappings form a concept hierarchy for the dimension location, mapping low-
level concepts (i.e., cities) to higher-level, more images (i.e., countries).

• Many concept hierarchies are implicit within the database schema.

For example,
Dimension location is described by the attributes number, street, city,
province or state, zip code, and country
• These attributes are related by a total order, forming a concept hierarchy such as
“street < city < province or state < country” as shown in the below figure.
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• A concept hierarchy for time

• A concept hierarchy that is a total or partial order among attributes in a database

schema is called a schema hierarchy
• Concept hierarchies may also be defined by discretizing or grouping values for a
given dimension or attribute, resulting in a set-grouping hierarchy

Example
Dimension: Price
Intervals: ($X …$Y) 18
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Measures: Their Categorization and Computation

How are measures computed?
• Multidimensional points in the data cube space can be defined by dimensions–value
pairs.
Example
<time = “Q1”, location =“Vancouver”, item = “computer”?>
• A data cube measure is a numeric function that can be evaluated at each point in
the data cube space.
• A measured value is computed for a given point by aggregating the data
corresponding to the respective dimension–value pairs defining the given point
• Measures can be organized into three categories based on the aggregation function
1. Distributive
2. Algebraic
3. Holistic

Distributive
• An aggregate function is distributive if it can be computed in a distributed manner.
• Suppose the data are partitioned into n sets.
• We apply the function to each partition, resulting in n aggregate values.
• If the result derived by applying the function to the n aggregate values is the same as
that derived by applying the function to the entire data set (without partitioning),
the function can be computed in a distributed manner.
For example,
sum() can be computed for a data cube by first partitioning the cube into a set of
subcubes, computing sum() for each subcube, and then summing up the counts
obtained for each subcube. Hence, sum() is a distributive aggregate function. For the
same reason, count(), min(), and max() are distributive aggregate functions.
• A measure is distributive if it is obtained by applying a distributive aggregate
function.
• Distributive measures can be computed efficiently because the computation can be
partitioned.

Algebraic
• An aggregate function is algebraic if it can be computed by an algebraic function with
M arguments, Where M is a bounded positive integer) each of which is obtained by
applying a distributive aggregate function.
For example,
1. avg() (average) can be computed by sum()/count(), where both sum() and count()
are distributive aggregate functions.
2. min N() and max N() (which find the N minimum and N maximum values,
respectively, in a given set) and standard deviation() are algebraic aggregate
functions.
3. A measure is algebraic if it is obtained by applying an algebraic aggregate
function
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Holistic:
• An aggregate function is holistic if there is no constant bound on the storage size
needed to describe a sub aggregate.
• That is, there does not exist an algebraic function with M arguments (where M is a
constant) that characterizes the computation. Common examples of holistic
functions include median (), mode(), and rank().
• A measure is holistic if it is obtained by applying a holistic aggregate function

Note
• Most large data cube applications require efficient computation of distributive and
algebraic measures.
• Many efficient techniques for this exist.
• It is challenging to compute holistic measures efficiently.
• Efficient techniques to approximate the computation of some holistic measures do
exist.

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Typical OLAP Operations

• Several OLAP data cube operations exist to materialize these different views,
allowing interactive querying and analysis of the data at hand.
• OLAP provides a user-friendly environment for interactive data analysis
• OLAP operations are
1. Roll-Up-Up
2. Drill -Down
3. Slice and Dice
4. Pivot(rotate)

Example
Data Cube represents: AllElectronics sales
Dimensions: location, time, and item
Where
• location is aggregated to city values
• time is aggregated concerning quarters
• item is aggregated concerning item types
Measure: dollars sold

Roll-up:
• The roll-up operation/ drill-up performs aggregation on a data cube by climbing up a
concept hierarchy for a dimension or by dimension reduction.
• Below is the result of a roll-up operation performed on the central cube by climbing
up the concept hierarchy for the location.
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• This hierarchy was defined as the total order of “street < city < province or state <
country.
• The roll-up operation shown aggregates the data by ascending the location
hierarchy from the city level to the country level.
• When roll-up is performed by dimension reduction, one or more dimensions are
removed from the given cube.

Drill-down
• Drill-down is the reverse of roll-up.
• It navigates from less detailed data to more complex data.
• Drill-down can be realized by either stepping down a concept hierarchy for a
dimension or introducing additional dimensions.
• Below figure shows the result of a drill-down operation performed on the central
cube by stepping down a concept hierarchy for the time defined as “day < month <
quarter < year.”
• Drill-down occurs by descending the time hierarchy from the quarter to the more
detailed month level.

Slice and dice

• The slice operation selects one dimension of the given cube, resulting in a sub-cube.
• Below figure shows a slice operation where the sales data are selected from the
central cube for the dimension time using the criterion time D “Q1.”
• The dice operation defines a sub-cube by performing a selection on two or more
dimensions
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Pivot (rotate)
• Pivot (also called rotate) is a visualization operation that rotates the data axes in
view to provide an alternative data presentation.
• Below figure shows a pivot operation where the item and location axes in a 2-D slice
are rotated.

Other OLAP operations

• Some OLAP systems offer additional drilling operations.
For example,
1. Drill-across executes queries involving (i.e., across) more than one fact table.
2. The drill-through operation uses relational SQL facilities to drill through the
bottom level of a data cube down to its back-end relational tables.
• Other OLAP operations may include ranking the top N or bottom N items in lists, as
well as computing moving averages, growth rates, interests, internal return rates,
depreciation, currency conversions, and statistical functions

Summary

• OLAP offers analytical modeling capabilities, including a calculation engine for

deriving ratios, variance, and so on, for computing measures across multiple
dimensions.
• It can generate summarizations, aggregations, and hierarchies at each granularity
level and every dimension intersection.
• OLAP also supports functional models for forecasting, trend analysis, and statistical
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analysis.
•
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In this context, an OLAP engine is a powerful data analysis tool

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OLAP Systems versus Statistical Databases

# OLAP Systems Statistical Databases

1 Targeted for business applications.
Focus on socioeconomic applications
2 No privacy issues Privacy issues regarding concept hierarchies
are a significant concern for SDBs.
3 Designed to support analytical Designed to help statistical applications.
application or decision making

Self-Learning Topic: A Starnet Query Model for Querying Multidimensional Databases

Source:
1. Pang-Ning Tan, Michael Steinbach, Vipin Kumar: Introduction to Data Mining, Pearson, First
impression,2014.

2. Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, Jian Pei: Data Mining -Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition,
Morgan Kaufmann Publisher, 2012.

Question Bank
1. What is a Data warehouse? Explain the three-tier architecture of the data
warehouse. [8 Marks] [Dec 2019/Jan2020]
2. Explain the Schemas of multidimensional data models. [8 Marks] [Dec
2019/Jan2020]
3. What is a Data cube measure? Explain the categorization of measures. [8 Marks]
[Dec 2019/Jan2020]
4. Explain data cube operations with examples. [8 Marks] [Dec 2019/Jan2020]
5. Describe a 3 -tier data warehouse architecture. [6 Marks] [June /July 2019] [8 Marks]
[Aug /Sept 2020].
6. Compare OLTP and OLAP Systems. [6 Marks] [June /July 2019]
7. What is Data warehouse and what are its four key features? [4 Marks] [June /July
2019]
8. Explain with suitable examples the various OLAP operations in a multidimensional
data model. [7 Marks] [June /July 2019] [8 Marks] [Aug /Sept 2020].
9. Explain the following terms with examples [9 Marks] [June /July 2019] [8 Marks] [Aug
/Sept 2020].
a. Snowflakes schema
b. Fact constellation schema
c. Star schema
10. What is Data Warehousing? Discuss various usage and trends in data warehousing .
[8 Marks] [Aug /Sept 2020].
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DATA MINING & DATA WAREHOUSING PAVAN KUMAR SP