A plan for OLAP

Abstract

So far, data warehousing has often been discussed in the light of complex OLAP queries and as reporting facility for operative data. We argue that business planning as a means to generate plan data is an equally important cornerstone of a data warehouse system, and we propose it to be a first-class citizen within an OLAP engine. We introduce an abstract model describing relevant aspects of the planning process in general and the requirements it poses to a planning engine. Furthermore, we show that business planning lends itself well to parallelization and benefits from a column-store much like traditional OLAP does. We then develop a physical model specifically targeted at a highly parallel column-store, and with our implementation, we show nearly linear scaling behavior.