An experimental consideration of the use of the transrelational™ model for data warehousing

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the research community in the utilisation of alternative data models that abandon the relational record storage and manipulation structure. The authors have already reported experimental considerations of the behavior of Relational, Binary Relational and Associative models within the context of Data Warehousing, to address issues of storage efficiency and combinatorial explosion through data repetition. In this paper we present an implementation of the Transrelational™ model, based on the public domain definition provided by C.J. Date, which we believe to be the first reported instantiation of the model. Following the presentation of the implementation, we also present the results of performance tests utilising a set of metrics for Data Warehouse environments, which are compared against a traditional N-ary Relational implementation. The experiment is based on the standard and widely-accepted TPC-H data set. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.