Minimizing the MOLAP/ROLAP Divide: You Can Have Your Performance and Scale It Too

Abstract

Over the past generation, data warehousing and online analytical processing (OLAP) applications have become the cornerstone of contemporary decision support environments. Typically, OLAP servers are implemented on top of either proprietary array-based storage engines (MOLAP) or as extensions to conventional relational DBMSs (ROLAP). While MOLAP systems do indeed provide impressive performance on common analytics queries, they tend to have limited scalability. Conversely, ROLAP's table oriented model scales quite nicely, but offers mediocre performance at best relative to the MOLAP systems. In this paper, we describe a storage and indexing framework that aims to provide both MOLAP like performance and ROLAP like scalability by essentially combining some of the best features from both. Based upon a combination of R-trees and bitmap indexes, the storage engine has been integrated with a robust OLAP query engine prototype that is able to fully exploit the efficiency of the proposed storage model. Specifically, it utilizes an OLAP algebra coupled with a domain specific query optimizer, to map user queries directly to the storage and indexing framework. Experimental results demonstrate that not only does the design improve upon more naive approaches, but that it does indeed offer the potential to optimize both query performance and scalability.