Hierarchies and Relative Operators in the OLAP Environment

In the last few years, numerous proposals for modelling and querying Multidimensional Databases (MDDB) are proposed. A rigorous classification of the different types of hierarchies is still an open problem. In this paper we propose and discuss some different types of hierarchies within a single dimension of a cube. These hierarchies divide in different levels of aggregation a single dimension. Depending on them, we discuss the characterization of some OLAP operators that refer to hierarchies in order to maintain the data cube consistency. Moreover, we propose a set of operators for changing the hierarchy structure. The issues discussed provide modelling flexibility during the scheme design phase and correct data analysis.