The present book's subject is multidimensional data models and data modeling concepts as they are applied in real data warehouses. The book aims to present the most important concepts within this subject in a precise and understandable manner. The book's coverage of fundamental concepts includes data cubes and their elements, such as dimensions, facts, and measures and their representation in a relational setting; it includes architecture-related concepts; and it includes the querying of multidimensional databases. The book also covers advanced multidimensional concepts that are considered to be particularly important. This coverage includes advanced dimension-related concepts such as slowly changing dimensions, degenerate and junk dimensions, outriggers, parent-child hierarchies, and unbalanced, non-covering, and non-strict hierarchies. The book offers a principled overview of key implementation techniques that are particularly important to multidimensional databases, including materialized views, bitmap indices, join indices, and star join processing. The book ends with a chapter that presents the literature on which the book is based and offers further readings for those readers who wish to engage in more in-depth study of specific aspects of the book's subject. Table of Contents: Introduction / Fundamental Concepts / Advanced Concepts / Implementation Issues / Further Readings
About the Author: Christian S. Jensen, Ph.D., Dr.Techn., is a Professor of Computer Science at Aarhus University, Denmark, and a part-time Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. Prior to joining Aarhus in 2010, he was employed full-time at Aalborg University. From September 2008 to August 2009, he was on sabbatical at Google Inc., Mountain View. He has previously been on several sabbaticals at University of Arizona. His research concerns data management and spans semantics, modeling, indexing, and query and update processing. During the past decade, his main focus has been on topics within spatio-temporal data management. He is an IEEE Fellow, a member of Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences, and the EDBT Endowment; and he is a trustee emeritus of the VLDB Endowment. In 2001 and 2002, he received Ib Henriksen's Research Award for his research in mainly temporal data management and Telenor's Nordic Research Award for his research in mobile services and data management. He is Vice-Chair of ACM SIGMOD. He is an editor-in-chief of the VLDB Journal and has served on the editorial boards of ACM TODS, IEEE TKDE, and the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin. He was PC chair or co-chair for STDM 1999, SSTD 2001, EDBT 2002, VLDB 2005, MobiDE 2006, MDM 2007, TIME 2008, DMSN 2008, and ISA 2010. He will be PC chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2011. Torben Bach Pedersen, Ph.D., is a Professor of Computer Science at Aalborg University, Denmark. Prior to joining Aalborg University in 2000, he worked in the software industry for more than six years. His research concerns business intelligence technologies such as multidimensional databases, multidimensional data modeling, data ware[1]housing, on-line analytical processing, data mining, and data integration with a focus on complex settings such as (semantic) web data, spatio-temporal data, and location-based services. He collaborates actively with many companies in the business intelligence industry. He is a member of the SSTD Endowment, ACM, and IEEE. In 2004, he received the Young Reseachers Award from the European Consortium of Innovate Universities for his research in business intelligence. He serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Data Warehousing and Mining, Journal of Computer Science and Engineering, and LNCS Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge[1]Centered Systems. He was PC Chair for DOLAP 2007 and DaWaK 2009 and 2010. He served as General Chair for SSTD 2009. He has served on more than 60 program committees, including VLDB, ICDE, and EDBT. Christian Thomsen, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Center for Data-Intensive Systems at the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Denmark. In 2008, he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Aalborg University. His research interests concern business intelligence and include multi-dimensional databases, data warehousing, right-time data warehousing, extract-transform-load processes, and online analytical processing. He has served on several program committees including DaWaK. He has given courses on data warehousing and related technologies to master's students and industrial practitioners. Further, he has organized business intelligence related seminars that span academia and industry.