Optimizing Access Across Multiple Hierarchies in DataWarehouses

In enterprise data warehouses, different users in different business units often define their own application specific dimension hierarchies tailor made to their reporting and business performance monitoring needs. Due to resource constraints, only on a small number of these hierarchies are precomputed for performance optimization. Consequently aggregations over hierarchies without precomputations are often less responsive. The authors report on a performance problem in a very large banking enterprise where the large number of application specific hierarchies became a performance bottleneck. This paper proposes a novel solution for optimizing the performance of data warehouses with a large number of application specific hierarchies.