DB2 Cube Models

DB2 cube models are an interesting representation of OLAP Cubes and metadata objects:  A cube model contains:

·         Cube facts objects

·         Cube dimensions

·         Cube hierarchies

·         Cube levels

Cube Model:

Dimension Detail:

The Cube:

The model is very close to the OLAP implementation, as expected… but the way they model cube dimension hierarchies is very interesting and helps the business analyst to focus on the business needs.

  You can find more from: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v8/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.db2.udb.db2_olap.doc/cmdcubemodel.htm

MDD Applied to Data Warehousing Systems: Cube Model

Cube Model (http://www.cubemodel.com) is an interesting example of MDD applied to data warehousing systems. They build models using the CWM specification and they use the model to assist in developing many of the necessary artifacts in data warehouse systems.

 “Therefore, the model is far more useful than just fancy documentation. Also, our models contain nothing like application code, so there is no translation of procedural code between languages. What the models do contain is a description of which objects have what kind of relationships to which other objects. Developers can write the code for a particular kind of relationship once and then use the model to generate an application to call their code in all the right places.”

You can find in Cube Model site interesting articles, papers and presentations:

• Building a Data Warehouse using CWM
• Faster Development with the CWM
• Cube Model: MDA Meets Open Source

The Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM™)

We are now studying the CWM specification from OMG (Object Management Group) and we think this specification will help us to define the ontology and the meta-model of our language. This specification defines Standard interfaces that can be used to enable easy interchange of warehouse and business intelligence metadata between warehouse tools, warehouse platforms and warehouse metadata repositories in distributed heterogeneous environments.

With CWM model and code generation we expect to automatically generate the following artifacts:

• Create ETL applications,
• Build the database tables for the warehouse,
• Create the OLAP layer,
• Create documentation for the system, and
• Reports