Approximate range–sum query answering on data cubes with probabilistic guarantees

Approximate range aggregate queries are one of the most frequent and useful kinds of queries for Decision Support Systems (DSS), as they are widely used in many data analysis tasks. Traditionally, sampling-based techniques have been proposed to tackle this problem. However, their effectiveness degrade when the underlying data distribution is skewed. Another approach based on the outlier management can limit the effect of data skews but fails to address other requirements of approximate range aggregate queries, such as error guarantees and query processing efficiency. In this paper, we present a technique that provides approximate answers to range aggregate queries on OLAP data cubes efficiently, with theoretical guarantees on the errors. Our basic idea is to build different data structures to manage outliers and the rest of the data. Carefully chosen outliers are organized in a quad-tree based indexing data structure to provide efficient access for query processing. A query-workload adaptive, tree-like synopsis data structure, called T unable P artition-Tree (TP-Tree), is proposed to organize samples extracted from non-outlier data. Our experiments clearly demonstrate the merits of our technique, by comparing with previous well-known techniques.