A look at some intriguing applications that use the RasDaMan MDBMS.
The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program
The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) supports several earth-sciences research projects for which drilling is essential (see
http://www.gfz-potsdam.de/pb5/icdp/
). The program helps scientists from different countries to cooperate and link together their scientific data.
ICDP provides an infrastructure for scientists to register their data directly at the bore holes. Each of the interconnected sites maintains its own database of drilling results. Finally, all sites' data is stored
homogeneously
in an MDBMS at the Geoforschungszentrum, located in Potsdam, Germany.
The benefit:
Thousands of megabytes of data, organized individually by several scientists, is available for fast analysis in a homogeneous environment.
The Human Brain Database
The European Computerized Human Brain Database (ECHBD) is a Web database of structural and functional information about the human brain (see
http://www.atlas.neuro.ki.se/Hba/
). It contains large amounts of 3-D images (modalities) from different sources and in different resolutions. Images from several
hundred brains
, both living and postmortem, have already been acquired.
The benefit:
Neuroscientists can run comparison and similarity searches and generate hypotheses about functional relationships within the cerebral cortex of the human brain.
Data Warehousing
Large enterprises maintain a multitude of separately grown operational databases, each of which serves a well-defined business task, such as purchasing, production planning, marketing, or customer support.
However, the data needed for managerial decision support is usually scattered across many heterogeneous, incompatible databases and is therefore difficult to
access. That's where a data warehouse -- a topical condensed extract of the corporate data asset suitable for strategic analyses -- can help.
Data warehouses are organized in multidimensional data cubes and augmented with dimension hierarchies that are the basis for aggregation queries such as "last year's cumulated monthly sales." Multidimensional databases
provide appropriate
compression of these sparsely populated cubes while preserving fast access to the data.
The benefit:
A genuine MDBMS not only frees system administrators from sparsity considerations but also enables the uniform administration of a data warehouse and other multidimensional data.
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Drilling results are combined from numerous bore-hole sites.
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Images from human skulls and brains.
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Data warehouses benefit from the MDBMS data-cube structure.
MDBMSes at Work
