Design of the Eratosthenes OLAP server

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a trend in database technology, based on the multidimensional view of data and is an indispensable component of the so-called business intelligence technology. The systems that realize this technology are called OLAP servers and are among the most high-priced products in software industry today [24j. The aim of this paper is twofold: (a) to describe the core levels of an OLAP system's architecture and to present design choices and reasoning for each one of them, and (b) to present the specific design decisions that we made for a prototype under development at NTUA, ERATOSTHENES. The paper describes in detail the most important decisions taken regarding the basic layers of the server component of ERATOSTHENES