Building Your First Cube

If you've worked in any technology-related field, you've probably heard the term cube thrown around, but most traditional DBAs and database developers haven't worked with them. Cubes are powerful data constructs for rapidly aggregating multi-dimensional data. If your organization wants to perform data analysis on large volumes of data, a cube is the ideal solution.

What Is a Cube?
Relational databases were designed to support thousands of concurrent transactions while maintaining performance and data integrity. By their very design, relational databases fall short in large volume data aggregation and retrieval. To aggregate and return large volumes of data, a relational database must receive a set-based query that asks for a set of data to be aggregated on the fly. These relational queries are very costly due to their reliance on multiple joins and aggregations, so relational aggregation queries perform poorly when operating on large data sets.