• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.247-261
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• 2002

Aggregation is an important operation that affects the performance of OLAP systems. In this paper we define a new class of aggregation queries, called range-groupby queries, and present a method for processing them. A range-groupby query is defined as a query that, for an arbitrarily specified region of an n-dimensional cube, computes aggregations for each combination of values of the grouping attributes. Range-groupby queries are used very frequently in analyzing information in MOLAP since they allow us to summarize various trends in an arbitrarily specified subregion of the domain space. In MOLAP applications, in order to improve the performance of query processing, a method of maintaining precomputed aggregation results, called the prefix-sum array, is widely used. For the case of range-groupby queries, however, maintaining precomputed aggregation results for each combination of the grouping attributes incurs enormous storage overhead. Here, we propose a fast algorithm that can compute range-groupby queries with minimal storage overhead. Our algorithm maintains only one prefix-sum away and still effectively processes range-groupby queries for all possible combinations of the grouping attributes. Compared with the method that maintains a prefix-sum array for each combination of the grouping attributes in an n-dimensional cube, our algorithm reduces the space overhead by (equation omitted), while accessing a similar number of cells.