Exact and Approximate Sizes of Convex Datacubes

Abstract

In various approaches, data cubes are pre-computed in order to efficiently answer Olap queries. The notion of data cube has been explored in various ways: iceberg cubes, range cubes, differential cubes or emerging cubes. Previously, we have introduced the concept of convex cube which generalizes all the quoted variants of cubes. More precisely, the convex cube captures all the tuples satisfying a monotone and/or antimonotone constraint combination. This paper is dedicated to a study of the convex cube size. Actually, knowing the size of such a cube even before computing it has various advantages. First of all, free space can be saved for its storage and the data warehouse administration can be improved. However the main interest of this size knowledge is to choose at best the constraints to apply in order to get a workable result. For an aided calibrating of constraints, we propose a sound characterization, based on inclusion-exclusion principle, of the exact size of convex cube as long as an upper bound which can be very quickly yielded. Moreover we adapt the nearly optimal algorithm HyperLogLog in order to provide a very good approximation of the exact size of convex cubes. Our analytical results are confirmed by experiments: the approximated size of convex cubes is really close to their exact size and can be computed quasi immediately.