OLAP Introduction and Overview

What Is a Cube?

One of the advantages of OLAP is how data and its relationships are stored and accessed. OLAP systems house data in structures that are readily available for detailed queries and analytics. Cubes are central to the OLAP storage process.

A cube is a set of data that is organized and structured in a hierarchical, multidimensional arrangement. The cube is usually derived from a subset of a data warehouse. Unlike relational databases that use two-dimensional data structures (often in the form of columns and rows in a spreadsheet), OLAP cubes are logical, multidimensional models that can have numerous dimensions and levels of data. Also, an organization typically has different cubes for different types of data.

One of the challenges of OLAP cube data storage and retrieval is the growth of data and how that growth affects the number of dimensions and levels in a cube hierarchy. As the number of dimensions increases over time, so does the number of data cells on an exponential scale. To maintain the efficiency and speed of the OLAP queries, the cube data is often presummarized into various consolidations and subtotals (aggregations).

Note: The SAS OLAP Server term cube is synonymous with the terms hyper-cube and multi-cube. [cautionend]

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