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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 1703–1704Cite as

Measure

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Synonyms

Numerical fact

Definition

A measure is a numerical property of a multidimensional cube, e.g., sales price, coupled with an aggregation formula, e.g., SUM. It captures numerical information to be used for aggregate computations.

Key Points

As an example, a three-dimensional cube for capturing sales may have a Product dimension P, a Time dimension T, and a Store dimension S, capturing the product sold, the time of sale, and the store it was sold in, for each sale, respectively. The cube has two measures: DollarSales and ItemSales, capturing the sales price and the number of items sold, respectively. ItemSales can be viewed as a function: ItemSales: Dom(P) × Dom(T) × Dom(S)↦ℕ 0 that given a certain combination of dimension values returns the total number of items sold for that combination. If a dimension value corresponds to a higher level in the dimension hierarchy, e.g., a product group or even all products, the result is an aggregation of several lower-level measure values.

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Recommended Reading

  1. Kimball R., Reeves L., Ross M., and Thornthwaite W. The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit. Wiley Computer Publishing, New York, 1998.

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  2. Pedersen T.B., Jensen C.S., and Dyreson C.E. A foundation for capturing and querying complex multidimensional data. Inf. Syst., 26(5):383–423, 2001.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Thomsen E. OLAP Solutions: Building Multidimensional Information Systems. Wiley, New York, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Torben Bach Pedersen

Authors
  1. Torben Bach Pedersen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Pedersen, T. (2009). Measure. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_885

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