An Implementation Scheme for Multidimensional Extendable Array Operations and Its Evaluation

Abstract

AbstractIn recent times, multidimensional arrays are extensively used to handle large amount of data in scientific research, engineering, and MOLAP applications. Most of the existing data structures are static in nature and cannot grow or shrink dynamically. The Traditional Multidimensional Array (TMA) is an efficient structure in terms of accessing the element of the array by straight computation of the addressing function, but TMA is not extendible during run time. There are some extendible data structures but they have the problem of address space overflow for large number of dimensions or length of dimension. In this paper we propose a new data structure, Extendible Karnaugh Array (EKA), to represent the multidimensional data. The main idea of this scheme is to represent n dimensional array by a set of two dimensional extendible arrays. The scheme can be extended in any direction during run time. We evaluate our proposed scheme by comparing for different operations with the Traditional Multidimensional Array (TMA). Our experimental result shows that the EKA scheme outperforms TMA.KeywordsMultidimensional ArrayExtendible ArrayKarnaugh MapRange QueryDynamic ExtensionMOLAP