| 摘要 |
A computer-implemented database and method providing an efficient, ordered reduced space representation of multi-dimensional data. The data values for each attribute are stored in a manner that provides an advantage in, for example, space usage and/or speed of access, such as in condensed form and/or sort order. Instances of each data value for an attribute are identified by instance elements, each of which is associated with one data value. Connectivity information is provided for each instance element that uniquely associates each instance element with a specific instance of a data value for another attribute. In accordance with one aspect of the invention, low cardinality fields (attributes) may be combined into a single field (referred to as a "combined field") having values representing the various combinations of the original fields. In accordance with another aspect of the invention, the data values for several fields may be stored in a single value list (referred to as a "union column"). Still another aspect of the invention is to apply redundancy elimination techniques, utilizing in some cases union columns, possibly together with combined fields, in order to reduce the space needed to store the database.
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