Terminologies

This page defines all terminologies. Objects in the OLAP cube use this convention.

Schema

A schema is a collection of N dimensions. It’s the meta description of cubes..

Hierarchy

A schema is divided in hierarchy, which are divided in dimensions. The main use of hierarchy is to check that different axis can not use dimensions of the same hierarchy.

Dimension

A dimension is an attribute, or set of attributes, by which you can divide measures into sub-categories. It’s a tree structure that define the axis of the cube. They can be explicitly defined: partner_id.country_id.state_ids or recursive ‘parent_id’. A dimension is divided in levels.

Level

One level of sub-categories defined by dimensions.

Measure

Meta data of the quantity your are measuring. (value) A measure may be complex, ex: the tuple (quantity,uom) Attributes which are also objects:

Agregator: an SQL function that define how we aggregate measures “sum”, “count”, “min”, “max”, “avg”, and “distinct-count” FormatString DataType (the measure/value datatype)

Cube

A cube is a collection of N axis. A cube is an instance of a schema. A cube is mapped to a ‘SQL’ query through the use of his axis. (or several)

Member

A member is a point within a dimension determined by a particular set of attribute values. (instances) A member is able to compute a part of the SQL query.

Axis

An axis is composed by one or a set of members. In others terms, the axis is defined by the part of the query preceding the “on rows”, “on columns”, “on pages”... The MDX result is also a cube composed of axis.

Value

A value is an instance of a measure. (one particular case of the cube).