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Web Services for DB2 Cube Views
Web services that allow client applications to perform basic online analytical processing (OLAP) over the Web, using XML and XPath.
Date Posted: June 27, 2003
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Update: January 27, 2005
Version 8.2: XPATH input now accepts level in its format; XML result set format now displays returned "cube-level" metadata objects; Web service infrastructure tested with newer version of Tomcat; documentation updated.
What is Web Services for DB2 Cube Views?
Web Services for DB2 Cube Views provide access to multidimensional data stored in DB2. These Web services allow a client application to read data from the cubes and perform basic online analysis on multidimensional data and metadata through the Web, using XPath and XML.
Definitions of OLAP cubes in DB2 can be maintained by the product DB2 Cube Views. A short introduction of DB2 as a server for OLAP cubes is available in the DB2magazine article "The OLAP-Aware Database."
How does it work? OLAP applications working on top of relational data must generate multipass SQL statements and then do further processing on rows returned. Web Services for DB2 Cube Views is an all-XML solution for querying OLAP metadata and data. It uses IBM DB2 Cube Views to retrieve OLAP metadata. Application queries are based on XPath. These are parsed by Web Services for DB2 Cube Views to generate SQL queries. Then the data is returned in XML format. The client application interacts with Web Services for DB2 Cube Views by the mean of three methods:
- Describe(): Allows a client to query OLAP metadata stored in DB2 Cube Views using XPath.
- Members(): Allows a client to query reference data (members) using XPath.
- Execute(): Allows a client to perform basic OLAP "slice-and-dice" queries using XPath.
Web Services for DB2 Cube Views can also be viewed as an extension to other XML-based database query processors, such as XML for Tables. While basic XML engines map plain relational tables into XML documents, Web Services for DB2 Cube Views add a multidimensional structure with aggregation hierarchies. The query language is still XML-based. Actually, XPath is reused as a query language for OLAP cubes. The client application, or, more specifically, the programmer of the application, is not required to understand a specialized OLAP query language. The similarity to other XML-based query systems is an important design goal.
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No researcher information is available at this time. Any questions regarding the creators of this technology will be answered in the discussion forum. |
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