What is a data cube?
A report, whether printed on paper or viewed on-screen, is at best a two-dimensional representation of data, a table using columns and rows. That’s sufficient when we have only two factors to consider, but in the real world we need more powerful tools. Data cubes are multidimensional extensions of 2-D tables, just as in geometry a cube is a three-dimensional extension of a square. The word cube brings to mind a 3-D object, and we can think of a 3-D data cube as being a set of similarly structured 2-D tables stacked on top of one another. But data cubes aren’t restricted to just three dimensions – there can be many more. SuperTABLE can be used to manipulate the data items into an easily understandable layout. The data cubes accessed and manipulated by SuperTABLE are often called SRD files, (Summary Record Database).
