At Kyvos, we are committed to solving our customer’s problems with the power of analytics. In this blog, you will learn how Kyvos allows you to modify your cube without going through the hassle of rebuilding it all together.
Cube building is an expensive task. It is a process of building a structured multidimensional dataset where all the dimensions, measures, attributes, and business logic are pre-aggregated and organized in a cube structure. This process impacts various factors like time, money, resource consumption, and many more. Now imagine what happens if you have to alter your cube design, such as adding some more attributes or measures to your existing cube. In most OLAP solutions, you would need to rebuild your entire cube after you make the change. This could be an extremely expensive and time-consuming exercise, especially if you are dealing with large datasets on the cloud.
The Need for Redesign
Irrespective how well you plan your initial cube, in a real business scenario you may encounter situations where you need remodel your design. A few such cases could be when you have to:
- Deal with changing business requirements
- Include additional business domain data
- Widen the scope of analytics
- Optimize your cube for response times or costs
Remodel your Cube without the Need to Rebuild
Let’s take a look at some common use cases where Kyvos eliminates the need to rebuild the cube.
Add New Measure, or Attribute
Broaden your visualization and perform deeper analytics
Let’s take the case where your cube is already built on a few years of historical data. You want to broaden your visualization by adding more measures or attributes to get meaningful insights. In this case, you don’t have to go through the trouble of building the entire cube again. Kyvos enables you to add entities to the cube and launch a new incremental build. You can instantly see the modifications you made in the cube.
Delete a Dimension, Measure, or Attribute from your Existing Cube
Optimize the cube by getting rid of the unused entities.
Now, suppose your cube has been serving queries for some time, and you realize that some entities haven’t been used in a while and may not be used in the future too. These attributes are unnecessarily affecting the persistent storage and size of your cube. Kyvos enables you to delete these attributes without requiring a full cube rebuild.
In fact, based on the query patterns Kyvos ML-powered Smart Recommendation Engine™ automatically suggests attributes that aren’t being used. You can delete such attributes to improve cube and query performance and reduce the associated costs. All you need to do is accept these recommendations and Kyvos itself deletes those attributes.
Reorder Entities in your Cube
No need to rebuild the cube for simple tasks like reordering.
Reordering gives you the flexibility to arrange measures, dimensions, and attributes based on your requirements. For instance, while building your cube initially, you grouped measures based on summary functions, or you defined a single measure group and added all your measures in that measure group.
Now imagine that your requirement has changed, and you want to define measures based on the logical grouping. In this case, you don’t have to rebuild the whole cube to change the order of measure grouping; instead, you can regroup/drag and drop the measures as per your need. Kyvos enables you to perform this kind of modification on cube entities without requiring the rebuild.
This increases flexibility, ease of usability and allows you to modify cube design. You can leverage this feature for any business use case.
Key Benefits of Kyvos’ Cube Modification Feature
Save on Cube Rebuilding Costs
Rebuilding the full cube to just add, delete or reorder one or more entities in a cube is a very expensive task. Since it consumes a lot of resources, your cloud computing costs may go up substantially in case of a full rebuild. Kyvos eliminates the need to rebuild the cube, helping you save these additional costs.
Enhance Performance by Discarding Undesirable Entities
Deleting unnecessary entities that are not being used helps reduce the aggregation size in subsequent builds, improving query performance and enabling cube optimization.
Ensure Quick Availability of the New Design
Creating a full build could take hours. The cube modification feature eliminates the need to rebuild the cube, hence saving your time and effort. Once the changes are made, the updated cube is instantly available to the business users.
Summary
With Kyvos’ Smart OLAPâ„¢, you can modify the existing cube to add, delete or reorder the entities by eliminating the need to rebuild the cube. This helps enhance query performance and improve the ability to perform multidimensional analytics on the cloud. Since the modifications made in the cube are reflected instantly, you don’t have to wait for hours to get reports to make better and faster decisions.
To learn more about our new features and understand how they can help you, schedule a 1:1 demo now.
Read more – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to OLAP
