Multidimensional Drill-downs using Cassandra

Multidimensional data is the type of data that has hierarchies. These hierarchies can be implicit or explicit. One of the most useful ways of navigating multidimensional hierarchies is by using drill-downs. This implies moving from summary information to detailed data by focusing in on something. These drill-downs cannot be handled through RDBMS solutions, as each additional drill-down is essentially a new where clause, and this gets progressively slower for large data.

Traditionally the problem of having consistently fast drill-downs was solved using special multidimensional data structures like OLAP cubes and MDX queries. However, with the advent of NoSQL technologies like Cassandra, we now have faster and cheaper ways of supporting these drill-downs.

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