What is a CUBE in data warehousing concept ?
Cubes are logical representation of multidimensional data. The name of "cube" is visually related to a 3 dimensional model, but we can have more than 3 dimensions.
Here is a 3 dimensional cube:
You can see that a cube has some dimensions. In this case we have 3 dimensions: product, location, time. In real life we can have more than 3 dimensions. In that case, inside a cube we can have another cubes.
A 3 dimensional cube is made of cubes. Each cube can be imagines as a sum of cubes.
Each cube store a value at the intersection of each dimension and that value is named measure. In that cube, 200, 100 are measures.
What is data cube technology used for ?
This kind of representation allows one to view aggregated data from a number of perspectives. So, this is used for reporting.
