The Design and Development of a Logical System for OLAP

We report on the design and development of a novel architecture for data warehousing. This architecture adds a “logical” level of abstraction to the traditional data warehousing framework, to guarantee an independence of OLAP applications from the physical storage structure of the data warehouse. This property allows users and applications to manipulate multidimensional data ignoring implementation details. Also, it supports the integration of multidimensional data stored in heterogeneous OLAP servers. We propose MD, a simple data model for multidimensional databases, as the reference for the logical layer. We then describe the design of a system, called MDS, that supports the above logical architecture.