An Alternative Relational OLAP Modeling Approach

Schema design is one of the fundamentals in database theory and practice as well. In this paper, we discuss the problem of locally valid dimensional attributes in a classification hierarchy of a typical OLAP scenario. In a first step, we show that the traditional star and snowflake schema approach is not feasible in this very natural case of a hierarchy. Therefore, we sketch two alternative modeling approaches resulting in practical solutions and a seamless extension of the traditional star and snowflake schema approach: In a pure relational approach, we replace each dimension table of a star / snowflake schema by a set of views directly reflecting the classification hierarchy. The second approach takes advantage of the object-relational extensions. Using object-relational techniques in the context for the relational representation of a multidimensional OLAP scenario is a novel approach and promises a clean and smooth schema design.