XML-Extended OLAP Querying

The rapidly changing data requirements of today’s dynamic business environments are not handled well by current On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) systems. Physically integrating data from new sources into OLAP systems is a long and time-consuming process, making logical integration the better choice in many situations. The increasing use of Extended Markup Language (XML), e.g. in business-to-business (B2B) applications, suggests that the required external data will most often be available in XML format. In this paper we present a theoretically well-founded approach to the logical federation of OLAP and XML data sources. The approach allows external XML data to be presented along with dimensional data in OLAP query results and enables the use of external XML data for selection and grouping. Special care is taken to ensure that semantic problems do not occur in the integration process. As almost all data sources can be effectively wrapped in XML format, the approach allows external data from sources such as relational, object-relational, and object databases to be used in a powerful and flexible way, opening up many new application areas for OLAP. To demonstrate the capabilities of the approach, we present a multi-schema query language based on the SQL and XPath languages. Performance results from the prototype implementation show that the approach is an attractive alternative to physical integration. The approach is exemplified using a real-world case study from the B2B domain.