Foreword

Some months ago, I was invited by Idea Group Publishing to write a book on multidimensional databases because of my long experience in this area (more than 20 years). I accepted because I felt there was a need to create a point of reference to the most important issues in this particular field of research.

This presented me with the opportunity of writing a brief history of this field and of distinguishing between what is new in recent research and what is merely a renaming of old concepts. As many authors have rightly pointed out, a large number of concepts, operations, etc. had already been proposed in the '80es, appearing in papers, journals, conferences, workshops, and books. Important papers by Chin; Denning; Klug; Malvestuto; McCharty; Ghosh; Olken; Meral and Gultekin Ozsoyoglu; Rafanelli; Sato; Schlorer; Shoshani; Su; Tansel; and Wong document the history of this field.

Many of the most important and well-known researchers have contributed to this book, and each of them has written about their own specialist field. I hope, after many months of work, that this book will represent a milestone.

It is not only a review of past papers, but also of current research projects, and I hope it will encourage the search for new solutions to the many problems that are still open. There have been incredible advances in technology and ever-increasing demands from users in the most diverse applicative areas (finance, medicine, statistics, business, etc.). This presents a challenge for researchers to discover new methodological tools for investigating both old and new research areas in the database field and, in particular, that of multidimensional databases.

I am very proud to have had the cooperation of such distinguished scientists, who have given prestige and significance to this work, and I would like to thank them with all my heart for their valuable contribution.