Using multidimensional databases for problem determination and planning of a networked application

Systems management accounts for 60% to 80% of the cost of LAN-connected personal computers. This paper describes a decision support application to reduce systems management costs in the area of problem determination and capacity planning for the Legato Backup System as it is used at Columbia University. Central to the system management tasks addressed is the use of data navigation, especially drill-down, roll-up, and pivot. These operations are provided by multidimensional databases (MDDB). As such, our application includes an MDDB layer. We discuss the application's architecture, the design of the MDDB schema, and outline the operation of the MDDB engine.