Virtual cubes
AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsMosha Pasumansky, Alexander Berger, Amir Netz
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Systems and methods for creating and maintaining virtual cubes are disclosed. A virtual cube is a logical representation of a subset of the dimensions and measures of at least one physical cube maintained by an OLAP server. Metadata defines the mappings from the dimensions and measures of the virtual cube to the dimensions and measures of the physical cube. Client applications can manipulate the virtual cube as if it were a physical cube.
Claims18
A computerized system comprising:
- a processor and a computer-readable medium;
- an operating environment executing on the processor from the computer-readable medium;
- and
- an OLAP server operative to maintain for each of a plurality of physical cubes a first data structure defining at least one physical cube dimension and at least one physical cube measure, and a second data structure defining a virtual cube, said second data structure including a mapping from the at least one physical cube dimension to a virtual cube dimension and a mapping from the at least one physical cube measure to a virtual cube measure.
A computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions for performing a method for creating a virtual cube, the method comprising:
- selecting a first physical cube, a dimension of the first physical cube and a measure of the first physical cube;
- creating a mapping from the dimension of the first physical cube to a first dimension of the virtual cube and a mapping from the measure of the first physical cube to a first measure of the virtual cube;
- selecting a second physical cube, a dimension of the second physical cube and a measure of the second physical cube;
- creating a mapping from the dimension of the second physical cube to a second dimension of the virtual cube and a mapping from the measure of the second physical cube to a second measure of the virtual cube;
- wherein the mapping information for the virtual cube is maintained by an OLAP server and made accessible to client applications.
A computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions for performing a method comprising;
- identifying a cell of a virtual cube using an identifier comprising at least one member of a dimension and at least one measure;
- determining a measure associated with a physical cube that is mapped to the measure of the virtual cube;
- and
- if a dimension in the identifier has a member that is not a default member and the dimension is not associated with the physical cube then returning a special value for the cell of the virtual cube,
- otherwise performing a set of tasks comprising;
- retrieving a value for a cell of the measure of the physical cube, and
- returning the value for the cell of the measure of the physical cube;
- wherein data defining the virtual cube is maintained by the OLAP server and made available to be read by a client.
A computerized method comprising:
- identifying a cell of a virtual cube using an identifier comprising at least one member of a dimension and at least one measure;
- determining a measure associated with a physical cube that is mapped to the measure of the virtual cube;
- and
- if a dimension in the identifier has a member that is not a default member and the dimension is not associated with the physical cube then returning a special value for the cell of the virtual cube,
- otherwise performing a set of tasks comprising:
- retrieving a value for a cell of the measure of the physical cube, and
- returning the value for the cell of the measure of the physical cube;
- wherein data defining the virtual cube is maintained by a server and made available to be read by a client.
A computerized method for creating a virtual cube, the method comprising:
- selecting a first physical cube, a dimension of the first physical cube and a measure of the first physical cube;
- creating a mapping from the dimension of the first physical cube to a first dimension of the virtual cube and a mapping from the measure of the first physical cube to a first measure of the virtual cube;
- selecting a second physical cube, a dimension of the second physical cube and a measure of the second physical cube;
- creating a mapping from the dimension of the second physical cube to a second dimension of the virtual cube and a mapping from the measure of the second physical cube to a second measure of the virtual cube,
- wherein the mapping information for the virtual cube is maintained by an OLAP server and made accessible to client applications.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.