XML Warehousing and OLAP

With the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) becoming a standard for representing business data (Beyer et al., 2005), a new trend toward XML data warehousing has been emerging for a couple of years, as well as efforts for extending the XQuery language with near On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) capabilities (grouping, aggregation, etc.). Though this is not an easy task, these new approaches, techniques and architectures aim at taking specificities of XML into account (e.g., heterogeneous number and order of dimensions or complex measures in facts, ragged dimension hierarchies…) that would be intricate to handle in a relational environment. The aim of this article is to present an overview of the major XML warehousing approaches from the literature, as well as the existing approaches for performing OLAP analyses over XML data (which is termed XML-OLAP or XOLAP; Wang et al., 2005). We also discuss the issues and future trends in this area and illustrate this topic by presenting the design of a unified, XML data warehouse architecture and a set of XOLAP operators expressed in an XML algebra.