The OLAP Concepts and Object-Relational Databases

A key to survival in the business world is being able to analyze, plan and react to changing business conditions as fast as possible. With multidimensional models the managers can explore information at different levels of granularity and the decision makers at all levels can quickly respond to changes in the business climate - the ultimate goal of business intelligence. Multidimensional modeling and the multidimensional models use concepts like: facts, dimensions, hierarchies, measures. This paper focuses on the implementation of the multidimensional concepts into object-relational databases. The multidimensional model can be transformed into a UML class diagram. Next I translate a UML class diagram into an object-relational database schema using an ORDBMS. Because the Star schema is widely accepted as the most viable data representation for multidimensional analysis in special in relational databases, I presents also a comparison between UML class diagram and star schema regarding the multidimensional modeling concepts