Segment Oriented Compression Scheme for MOLAP Based on Extendible Multidimensional Arrays

Abstract

Many statistical and MOLAP applications use multidimensional arrays as the basic data structure to allow the efficient and convenient storage and retrieval of large volumes of business data for decision making. Allocation of data or data compression is a key performance factor for this purpose because performance strongly depends on the amount of storage required and availability of memory. This holds especially for data warehousing environments in which huge amounts of data have to be dealt with. The most evident consequence of data compression is that it reduces storage cost by packing more logical data per unit of physical capacity. And improved performance is a net outcome because less physical data need to be retrieved during scan-oriented queries. In this paper, an efficient data compression technique is proposed based on the notion of extendible array. The main idea of the scheme is to compress each of the segments of the extendible array using the position information only. We compare the proposed scheme for different performance issues with prominent compression schemes.