Handling Big Dimensions in Distributed Data Warehouses using the DWS Technique

Abstract

The DWS (Data Warehouse Striping) technique allows the distribution of large data warehouses through a cluster of computers. The data partitioning approach partition the facts tables through all nodes and replicates the dimension tables. The replication of the dimension tables creates a limitation to the applicability of the DWS technique to data warehouses with big dimensions. This paper proposes a strategy to handle large dimensions in a distributed DWS system and evaluates the proposed strategy experimentally. With the proposed strategy the performance speed up and scale up obtained in the DWS technique are not affected by the presence of big dimensions. Furthermore, it extends the scope of the technique to queries that browse big dimensions that can also benefit of the performance increase of the DWS technique.