Chapter 3: Data Warehousing and

OLAP Technology: An Overview

What is a data warehouse?

Data warehouse architecture

From data warehousing to data mining

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

What is Data Warehouse?

Defined in many different ways, but not rigorously.

A decision support database that is maintained separately from

the organizations operational database

Support information processing by providing a solid platform of

consolidated, historical data for analysis.

A data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant,

and nonvolatile collection of data in support of managements
decision-making process.W. H. Inmon

Data warehousing:

The process of constructing and using data warehouses

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Data WarehouseSubject-Oriented

Organized around major subjects, such as customer,

product, sales

Focusing on the modeling and analysis of data for

decision makers, not on daily operations or transaction
processing

Provide a simple and concise view around particular

subject issues by excluding data that are not useful in
the decision support process

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Data WarehouseIntegrated

Constructed by integrating multiple, heterogeneous data

sources
relational databases, flat files, on-line transaction
records
Data cleaning and data integration techniques are
applied.
Ensure consistency in naming conventions, encoding
structures, attribute measures, etc. among different
data sources

E.g., Hotel price: currency, tax, breakfast covered, etc.

When data is moved to the warehouse, it is

converted.

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Data WarehouseTime Variant

The time horizon for the data warehouse is significantly

longer than that of operational systems

Operational database: current value data

Data warehouse data: provide information from a
historical perspective (e.g., past 5-10 years)

Every key structure in the data warehouse

Contains an element of time, explicitly or implicitly

But the key of operational data may or may not

contain time element

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Data WarehouseNonvolatile

A physically separate store of data transformed from the

operational environment

Operational update of data does not occur in the data

warehouse environment

Does not require transaction processing, recovery,

and concurrency control mechanisms

Requires only two operations in data accessing:

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initial loading of data and access of data

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Data Warehouse vs. Heterogeneous DBMS

Traditional heterogeneous DB integration: A query driven approach

Build wrappers/mediators on top of heterogeneous databases

When a query is posed to a client site, a meta-dictionary is used

to translate the query into queries appropriate for individual

heterogeneous sites involved, and the results are integrated into

a global answer set

Complex information filtering, compete for resources

Data warehouse: update-driven, high performance

Information from heterogeneous sources is integrated in advance

and stored in warehouses for direct query and analysis

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Data Warehouse vs. Operational DBMS

OLTP (on-line transaction processing)

Major task of traditional relational DBMS

Day-to-day operations: purchasing, inventory, banking,
manufacturing, payroll, registration, accounting, etc.

OLAP (on-line analytical processing)

Major task of data warehouse system

Data analysis and decision making

Distinct features (OLTP vs. OLAP):

User and system orientation: customer vs. market

Data contents: current, detailed vs. historical, consolidated

Database design: ER + application vs. star + subject

View: current, local vs. evolutionary, integrated

Access patterns: update vs. read-only but complex queries

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

OLTP vs. OLAP

OLTP

OLAP

users

clerk, IT professional

knowledge worker

function

day to day operations

decision support

DB design

application-oriented

subject-oriented

data

current, up-to-date
detailed, flat relational
isolated
repetitive

historical,
summarized, multidimensional
integrated, consolidated
ad-hoc
lots of scans

unit of work

read/write
index/hash on prim. key
short, simple transaction

# records accessed

tens

millions

#users

thousands

hundreds

DB size

100MB-GB

100GB-TB

metric

transaction throughput

query throughput, response

usage
access

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complex query

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Why Separate Data Warehouse?

High performance for both systems

Warehousetuned for OLAP: complex OLAP queries,

multidimensional view, consolidation

Different functions and different data:

DBMS tuned for OLTP: access methods, indexing, concurrency

control, recovery

missing data: Decision support requires historical data which

operational DBs do not typically maintain
data consolidation: DS requires consolidation (aggregation,
summarization) of data from heterogeneous sources
data quality: different sources typically use inconsistent data
representations, codes and formats which have to be reconciled

Note: There are more and more systems which perform OLAP
analysis directly on relational databases

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

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Chapter 3: Data Warehousing and

OLAP Technology: An Overview

What is a data warehouse?

Data warehouse architecture

From data warehousing to data mining

December 18, 2014

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

11

Design of Data Warehouse: A Business

Analysis Framework

Four views regarding the design of a data warehouse

Top-down view

Data source view

exposes the information being captured, stored, and

managed by operational systems

Data warehouse view

allows selection of the relevant information necessary for the

data warehouse

consists of fact tables and dimension tables

Business query view

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sees the perspectives of data in the warehouse from the view

of end-user
Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

12

Data Warehouse Design Process

Top-down, bottom-up approaches or a combination of both

Top-down: Starts with overall design and planning (mature)

Bottom-up: Starts with experiments and prototypes (rapid)

From software engineering point of view

Waterfall: structured and systematic analysis at each step before

proceeding to the next
Spiral: rapid generation of increasingly functional systems, short
turn around time, quick turn around

Typical data warehouse design process

Choose a business process to model, e.g., orders, invoices, etc.

Choose the grain (atomic level of data) of the business process

Choose the dimensions that will apply to each fact table record

Choose the measure that will populate each fact table record

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

13

Data Warehouse: A Multi-Tiered Architecture

Other
sources
Operational
DBs

Metadata

Extract
Transform
Load
Refresh

Monitor
&
Integrator

Data
Warehouse

OLAP Server

Serve

Analysis
Query
Reports
Data mining

Data Marts

Data Sources
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Data Storage

OLAP Engine Front-End Tools

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

14

Three Data Warehouse Models

Enterprise warehouse
collects all of the information about subjects spanning
the entire organization
Data Mart
a subset of corporate-wide data that is of value to a
specific groups of users. Its scope is confined to
specific, selected groups, such as marketing data mart

Independent vs. dependent (directly from warehouse) data mart

Virtual warehouse
A set of views over operational databases
Only some of the possible summary views may be
materialized

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

15

Data Warehouse Development:

A Recommended Approach
Multi-Tier Data
Warehouse

Distributed
Data Marts

Data
Mart

Data
Mart

Model refinement

Enterprise
Data
Warehouse

Model refinement

Define a high-level corporate data model

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

16

Data Warehouse Back-End Tools and Utilities

Data extraction
get data from multiple, heterogeneous, and external
sources
Data cleaning
detect errors in the data and rectify them when possible
Data transformation
convert data from legacy or host format to warehouse
format
Load
sort, summarize, consolidate, compute views, check
integrity, and build indicies and partitions
Refresh
propagate the updates from the data sources to the
warehouse

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

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Metadata Repository

Meta data is the data defining warehouse objects. It stores:

Description of the structure of the data warehouse

schema, view, dimensions, hierarchies, derived data defn, data

mart locations and contents

Operational meta-data

data lineage (history of migrated data and transformation path),

currency of data (active, archived, or purged), monitoring
information (warehouse usage statistics, error reports, audit trails)

The algorithms used for summarization

The mapping from operational environment to the data warehouse

Data related to system performance

warehouse schema, view and derived data definitions
Business data

business terms and definitions, ownership of data, charging policies

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

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OLAP Server Architectures

Relational OLAP (ROLAP)

Include optimization of DBMS backend, implementation of

aggregation navigation logic, and additional tools and services
Greater scalability

Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP)

Sparse array-based multidimensional storage engine

Fast indexing to pre-computed summarized data

Hybrid OLAP (HOLAP) (e.g., Microsoft SQLServer)

Use relational or extended-relational DBMS to store and manage

warehouse data and OLAP middle ware

Flexibility, e.g., low level: relational, high-level: array

Specialized SQL servers (e.g., Redbricks)

Specialized support for SQL queries over star/snowflake schemas

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

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Chapter 3: Data Warehousing and

OLAP Technology: An Overview

What is a data warehouse?

Data warehouse architecture

From data warehousing to data mining

December 18, 2014

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

20

Data Warehouse Usage

Three kinds of data warehouse applications

Information processing

supports querying, basic statistical analysis, and reporting

using crosstabs, tables, charts and graphs

Analytical processing

multidimensional analysis of data warehouse data

supports basic OLAP operations, slice-dice, drilling, pivoting

Data mining

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knowledge discovery from hidden patterns

supports associations, constructing analytical models,
performing classification and prediction, and presenting the
mining results using visualization tools
Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

21

From On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP)

to On Line Analytical Mining (OLAM)

Why online analytical mining?

High quality of data in data warehouses
DW contains integrated, consistent, cleaned data
Available information processing structure surrounding
data warehouses
ODBC, OLEDB, Web accessing, service facilities,
reporting and OLAP tools
OLAP-based exploratory data analysis
Mining with drilling, dicing, pivoting, etc.
On-line selection of data mining functions
Integration and swapping of multiple mining
functions, algorithms, and tasks

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

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An OLAM System Architecture

Mining query

Mining result

Layer4
User Interface

User GUI API

OLAM
Engine

OLAP
Engine

Layer3
OLAP/OLAM

Data Cube API

Layer2

MDDB

MDDB
Meta Data

Filtering&Integration

Database API

Filtering

Layer1
Data cleaning

Databases
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Data
Data integration Warehouse
Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Data
Repository

23

Chapter 3: Data Warehousing and

OLAP Technology: An Overview

What is a data warehouse?

A multi-dimensional data model

Data warehouse architecture

Data warehouse implementation

From data warehousing to data mining

Summary

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

24

Summary: Data Warehouse and OLAP Technology

Why data warehousing?

Data warehouse architecture

From OLAP to OLAM (on-line analytical mining)

December 18, 2014

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

25

References (I)

S. Agarwal, R. Agrawal, P. M. Deshpande, A. Gupta, J. F. Naughton, R. Ramakrishnan,

and S. Sarawagi. On the computation of multidimensional aggregates. VLDB96

D. Agrawal, A. E. Abbadi, A. Singh, and T. Yurek. Efficient view maintenance in data

warehouses. SIGMOD97
R. Agrawal, A. Gupta, and S. Sarawagi. Modeling multidimensional databases. ICDE97
S. Chaudhuri and U. Dayal. An overview of data warehousing and OLAP technology.
ACM SIGMOD Record, 26:65-74, 1997

E. F. Codd, S. B. Codd, and C. T. Salley. Beyond decision support. Computer World, 27,
July 1993.
J. Gray, et al. Data cube: A relational aggregation operator generalizing group-by,
cross-tab and sub-totals. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 1:29-54, 1997.
A. Gupta and I. S. Mumick. Materialized Views: Techniques, Implementations, and
Applications. MIT Press, 1999.
J. Han. Towards on-line analytical mining in large databases. ACM SIGMOD Record,
27:97-107, 1998.
V. Harinarayan, A. Rajaraman, and J. D. Ullman. Implementing data cubes efficiently.
SIGMOD96

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References (II)

C. Imhoff, N. Galemmo, and J. G. Geiger. Mastering Data Warehouse Design: Relational

and Dimensional Techniques. John Wiley, 2003

W. H. Inmon. Building the Data Warehouse. John Wiley, 1996

R. Kimball and M. Ross. The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to
Dimensional Modeling. 2ed. John Wiley, 2002
P. O'Neil and D. Quass. Improved query performance with variant indexes. SIGMOD'97
Microsoft. OLEDB for OLAP programmer's reference version 1.0. In
http://www.microsoft.com/data/oledb/olap, 1998
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S. Sarawagi and M. Stonebraker. Efficient organization of large multidimensional arrays.
ICDE'94
OLAP council. MDAPI specification version 2.0. In
http://www.olapcouncil.org/research/apily.htm, 1998
E. Thomsen. OLAP Solutions: Building Multidimensional Information Systems. John Wiley,
1997

P. Valduriez. Join indices. ACM Trans. Database Systems, 12:218-246, 1987.

J. Widom. Research problems in data warehousing. CIKM95.

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