A Temporal Multidimensional Model and OLAP Operators

Usually, data in data warehouses (DWs) are stored using the notion of the multidimensional (MD) model. Often, DWs change in content and structure due to several reasons, like, for instance, changes in a business scenario or technology. For accurate decision-making, a DW model must allow storing and analyzing time-varying data. This paper addresses the problem of keeping track of the history of the data in a DW. For this, first, a formalization of the traditional MD model is proposed and then extended as a generalized temporal MD model. The model comes equipped with a collection of typical online analytical processing (OLAP) operations with temporal semantics, which is formalized for the four classic operations, namely roll-up, dice, project, and drill-across. Finally, the mapping from the generalized temporal model into a relational schema is presented together with an implementation of the temporal OLAP operations in standard SQL.