Deflation, continued
There are several reasons, why we might want to deflate a cube. Two of them are the most important.
- To present the contents of a cube to the observer we normally use paper or computer screen which is 2-dimensional. To make all the data visible, we need to deflate the cube.
A spreadsheet is a typical example. We split dimensions into two groups (rows and columns) and perform slicing within the groups. This is usually called pivoting.
- When we execute queries against data, we sometimes end up with sets of cells which do not form a grid. Since we want the result of a query to be another cube, we either have to apply grid completion or deflate the set until it is possible to endow it with a grid structure.