MIS 2502 Extra Credit: Virtual Data Cubes

What are Virtual Data Cubes?

Virtual Data cubes are a logical combination of one or multiple data cubes.  They only store definitions of the real cube and require no disk space to store them. Virtual cubes are similar to views in relational database and are a logical construct that contain no data themselves (Rouse). Virtual cubes can merge portions of multiple source cubes from the same database and provide a single view to analyze combination of dimensions and measures.

How Virtual Data Cubes relate to material covered in MIS2502?

Virtual Data Cubes build on the topics of Data Mining and Data Cubes discussed in the class. Data Cube summarizes the data taken from live databases, in separate data warehouses and allow analyzing the data without slowing source databases performance. A Virtual Cube can merge different cubes together and provide a single query destination that returns collective results from the cubes that compose it. Virtual cubes use efficient data partitioning for ideal cache utilization and drastically improve the response time of the cube server queries (Mitrea).

Case Study

Virtual cubes have been used in IBM InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 software to combine business scenarios and to improve performance. In IBM InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7, a virtual cube is defined in terms of two or more existing cubes which can be merged in pairs. The merging is done based on the dimension names and query issued against a virtual cube is routed to depending cubes, which creates two results that are combined based on the merge operation of the virtual cube (Mitrea). IBM Infosphere Warehouse Enterprise Edition is used by many companies for customized content arbitration. Macys.com uses the Infosphere data warehouse framework for aggregating data from different sales cubes and real-time analysis of customer data. It uses the platform to integrate its enterprise customer data, analyze and extract insights from it, and use it to shape the customer experience at macys.com.

References:

Rouse, M. (2012, April). Virtual cube. Retrieved from http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/definition/virtual-cube

Mitrea, A. (2009, Sept 10). Using Virtual Cube in IBM. Retrieved from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-0909infospherevirtualcubes/

Macys.com: Focusing on each customer as the brand goes national. (2010, Aug 30). Retrieved from http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/GMMY-88TG8L?OpenDocument&Site=default&cty=en_us