Virtual Cube

Virtual Cube - The term used in Microsoft's Analysis Services (OLAP Services) for a cube that is created from portions of one or more base cubes.

A virtual cube is similar to a view in a relational database. It can be used for security purposes, giving users access to only some of the dimensions and measures. It can also be used to show data from separate cubes at the same time.

Virtual cubes are much more useful when you have shared dimensions and measures that are common to all the base cubes that are used.

[Category=Data Warehousing ]

Source: SDG Computing Inc., 13 May 2010 08:36:45, SDG Computing, now offline

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virtual cube - Virtual cubes are often likened to views in a relational database. A virtual cube merges portions of two existing cubes so that a combination of dimensions and measures can be analyzed through the single, virtual cube. For example, a retailer may have two cubes: one that stores the number of visitors to its website and another that stores purchases. A virtual cube could be used to correlate the data from both cubes to calculate the average sales per website visit.

Virtual cubes can also be used to prevent unauthorized users from viewing private or sensitive information. For example, if a cube has both sensitive and non-sensitive information, the non-sensitive information can be made available in a virtual cube for those users who need it. The sensitive data, meanwhile, remains in the existing cube where it is accessed by authorized users.

Related glossary terms: columnar database, Not Only SQL (NoSQL), sparsity and density, sparse and dense, Amazon Dynamo Database (DDB), On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), in-memory database, Google BigTable, denormalization, Cassandra (Apache Cassandra), data classification

[Category=Data Management ]

Source: WhatIs.com, 15 September 2013 09:27:59, http://whatis.techtarget.com/glossary/Data-and-Data-Management