Storage Estimation for Multidimensional Aggregates in the Presence of Hierarchies

Abstract

To speed up multidimensional data analysis, database systems frequently precompute aggregates on some subsets of dimensions and their corresponding hierarchies. This improves query response time. However, the decision of what and how much to precompute is a difficult one. It is further complicated by the fact that precomputation in the presence of hierarchies can result in an unintuitively large increase in the amount of storage required by the database. Hence, it is interesting and useful to estimate the storage blowup that will result from a proposed set of precomputations without actually computing them. We propose three strategies for this problem: one based on sampling, one based on mathematical approximation, and one based on probabilistic counting. We investigate the accuracy of these algorithms in estimating the blowup for different data distributions and database schemas. The algorithm based upon probabilistic counting is particularly attractive, since it estimates the storage...