Types of OLAP servers

Types of OLAP servers

Jiawei Han & Micheline Kamber

OLAP is a relatively new technology, and the fact that there are several varieties is even more confusing to the newbie. This tip from Han and Kamber's "Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques" (Morgan Kaufman) helps you sort through the different flavors of OLAP servers.

So what kinds of OLAP servers exist? Logically, OLAP servers present business users with multidimensional data from data warehouses or data marts, without concerns regarding how or where the data are stored. However, the physical architecture and implementation of OLAP servers must consider data storage issues. Implementation of a warehouse server for OLAP processing may include the following:

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Relational OLAP (ROLAP) servers: These are the intermediate servers that stand in between a relational back-end server and client front-end tools. They use a relational or extended-relational DBMS to store and manage warehouse data, and OLAP middleware to support missing pieces. ROLAP servers include optimization for each DBMS back end, implementation of aggregation navigation logic, and additional tools and services. ROLAP technology tends to have greater scalability than MOLAP technology. The Microstrategy's DSS server and Informix's Metacube, for example, adopt the ROLAP approach.

Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) servers: These servers support multidimensional views of data through array-based multidimensional storage engines. They map multidimensional views directly to data cube array structures. For example, Essbase from Hyperion is a MOLAP server. The advantage of using a data cube is that it allows fast indexing to precomputed summarized data. Notice that with multidimensional data stores, the storage utilization may be low if the data set is sparse. In such cases, sparse matrix compression techniques should be explored.Many MOLAP servers adopt a two-level storage representation to handle sparse and dense data sets: the dense subcubes are identified and stored as array structures, while the sparse subcubes employ compression technology for efficient storage utilization.

Hybrid OLAP (HOLAP) servers: The hybrid OLAP approach combines ROLAP and MOLAP technology, benefiting from the greater scalability of ROLAP and the faster computation of MOLAP. For example, a HOLAP server may allow large volumes of detail data to be stored in a relational database, while aggregations are kept in a separate MOLAP store. The Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 OLAP Services supports a hybrid OLAP server.

Specialized SQL servers: To meet the growing demand of OLAP processing in relational databases, some relational and data warehousing firms (e.g., Red Brick from Informix) implement specialized SQL servers that provide advanced query language and query processing support for SQL queries over star and snowflake schemas in a read-only environment.

 

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This was first published in March 2001

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