Efficient Compression and Storage of XML OLAP Cubes

Abstract

In this paper, the authors present an approach to efficiently compress XML OLAP cubes. They propose a multidimensional snowflake schema of the cube as the basic physical configuration. The cube is then composed of one XML fact document and as many XML documents as the dimension hierarchy members. The basic configuration is reorganized into two ways by adding data redundancy on purpose in order to achieve a better compression ratio on the one hand and to improve query response time on the other hand. In the second configuration, all the documents of the cube are merged into one single XML document. In the third configuration, each reference between the fact and the dimensions or between the members of a dimension hierarchy is replaced by the whole XML referenced fragments. To the three physical configurations of the cube, the authors apply a new compression technique named XCC. They demonstrate the efficiency of the third configuration before and after compression and they also show the efficiency of their compression technique when applied to XML OLAP cubes.