Operations
Conceiving data as a cube with hierarchical dimensions leads to conceptually straightforward operations to facilitate analysis. Aligning the data content with a familiar visualization enhances analyst learning and productivity. The user-initiated process of navigating by calling for page displays interactively, through the specification of slices via rotations and drill down/up is sometimes called "slice and dice". Common operations include slice and dice, drill down, roll up, and pivot.
Slice is the act of picking a rectangular subset of a cube by choosing a single value for one of its dimensions, creating a new cube with one fewer dimension. The picture shows a slicing operation: The sales figures of all sales regions and all product categories of the company in the year 2004 are "sliced" out of the data cube.
Dice: The dice operation produces a subcube by allowing the analyst to pick specific values of multiple dimensions. The picture shows a dicing operation: The new cube shows the sales figures of a limited number of product categories, the time and region dimensions cover the same range as before.
Drill Down/Up allows the user to navigate among levels of data ranging from the most summarized (up) to the most detailed (down). The picture shows a drill-down operation: The analyst moves from the summary category "Outdoor-Schutzausrüstung" to see the sales figures for the individual products.
Roll-up: A roll-up involves summarizing the data along a dimension. The summarization rule might be computing totals along a hierarchy or a applying a set of formulas such as "profit = sales - expenses".
Pivot allows an analyst to rotate the cube in space to see its various faces. For example, cities could be arranged vertically and products horizontally while viewing data for a particular quarter. Pivoting could replace products with time periods to see data across time for a single product.
The picture shows a pivoting operation: The whole cube is rotated, giving another perspective on the data.
Read more about this topic: OLAP Cube
Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)