The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 15, 2003
Filed:
Apr. 22, 1999
Usama Fayyad, Mercer Island, WA (US);
Jayavel Shanmugasundaram, Madison, WI (US);
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
An apparatus and method for efficiently compressing contents of a database system to support ad hoc querying and OLAP type aggregation queries. This invention consists of a new compressed representation of the data cube that (a) drastically reduces storage requirements, (b) does not require the discretization hierarchy along each query dimension to be fixed beforehand and (c) treats each dimension as a potential target measure and supports multiple aggregation functions without additional storage costs. The tradeoff is approximate, yet relatively accurate, answers to queries. We outline mechanisms to reduce the error in the approximation. Our performance evaluation indicates that our compression technique effectively addresses the limitation of existing approaches. The basic method relies on representing the contents of the database by a probability distribution consisting of a mixture of Gaussians. Aggregation queries, be they multi-dimensional, conjunctive, or disjunctive, can be answered by performing integration over the probability distribution.