Cubes

Overview

A cube is an in-memory data structure store that uses a columnar model to store the data. It stores the data in contiguous arrays in the memory, by column. This is opposed to the row storage model that is common in database engines.

A parallel between the two models is shown in fig. 27.

Fig. 27: The column and row storage models.

This storage model is very efficient when you need to perform aggregation queries or queries with simple analytic operations on large data sets.