Parallel ROLAP Data Cube Construction on Shared-Nothing Multiprocessors

The pre-computation of data cubes is critical to improving the response time of On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) systems and can be instrumental in accelerating data mining tasks in large data warehouses. In order to meet the need for improved performance created by growing data sizes, parallel solutions for generating the data cube are becoming increasingly important. This paper presents a parallel method for generating data cubes on a shared-nothing multiprocessor. Since no (expensive) shared disk is required, our method can be used on low cost Beowulf style clusters consisting of standard PCs with local disks connected via a data switch. Our approach uses a ROLAP representation of the data cube where views are stored as relational tables. This allows for tight integration with current relational database technology