Object-Relational Queries into Multidimensional Databases with the Active Data Repository

As computational power and storage capacity increase, processing and analyzing large volumes of multi-dimensional datasets play an increasingly important role in many domains of scienti c research. Scienti c applications that make use of very large scienti c datasets have several important characteristics: datasets consist of complex data and are usually multi-dimensional; applications usually retrieve a subset of all the data available in the dataset; various applicationspeci c operations are performed on the data items retrieved. Such applications can be supported by object-relational database management systems (OR-DBMSs). In addition to providing functionality to de ne new complex datatypes and user-de ned functions, an OR-DBMS for scienti c datasets should contain runtime support that will provide optimized storage for very large datasets and an execution environment for user-de ned functions involving expensive operations. In this paper we describe an infrastructure, the Active Data Repository (ADR), which provides a framework for building databases that enables integration of storage, retrieval and processing of multi-dimensional datasets on a parallel machine. The system architecture of ADR provides the functionality required from runtime support for an OR-DBMS that stores and processes scienti c multi-dimensional datasets. We present the system architecture of the ADR, and experimental performance results for three applications implemented using ADR.