Studierende stehen vor dem LC und blicken lächelnd einer Kollegin mit einer Mappe in der Hand nach.

Exercise No. 12: Analyzing Flight Utilization (apa)

This cube stores data about the utilization of flights from and to certain airports. Data is collected for each class (economy, business and first class).

We have four dimensions with the following hierarchical structure:

Table A.E.16.1 - Analyzing flight utilization

Please build the Aggregation Path Array and assume the following end-user requirements:

1) "a quarterly and annual report for each combination of airport of destination and airport of origin, irrespective of the class"

2) "a full drill-down by the time dimension for each class, independent of the destination and origin airports"

Select the corresponding cells in the APA and choose the cubes to materialize, then highlight the derivatives of those cubes.

Solution

Figure A.E.16.1 - The resulting APA with the redundancy free-set highlighted

Size of the redundancy-free set (including the base cube): 72

Required cubes, the materialization decision and derivatives

The blue area represents the end-user requirement 1 ("a quarterly and annual report for each combination of airport of destination and airport of origin, irrespective of the class") and requirement 2 ("a full drill-down by the time dimension for each class, independent of the destination and origin airports").

Materializing cube v = ( C_*,F_ap,D_ap,T_q) (dark blue cell "T_q", representing end-user requirement 1) and cube w = (C_cl,F_*, D_*, T_m) (dark green cell "D_*", representing end-user requirement 2) offer us the following sets of derivatives.

Figure A.E.16.2 - Derivatives of cube v = ( C_*,F_ap,D_ap,T_q)

Figure A.E.16.3 - Derivatives of cube w = (C_cl,F_*, D_*, T_m)

Figures A.E.16.2 and A.E.16.3 show that end-user requirement 2 is not covered by the derivatives of v. To meet all end-user requirements we will have to materialize both cubes, v and w.