The deprecation of cubes

Are cubes here to stay? Maybe not. The advent of big data solutions and the continued evolution of Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs) may make cubes obsolete. Cubes pre-aggregate data, which can make certain analytic and reporting needs very quick; however, as RDBMS and big data solutions become faster, easier to query, and more sophisticated, the pre-aggregation paradigm may become obsolete. Some argue that cubes are already obsolete. Also, cubes have serious drawbacks, including no performance advantage for non-aggregated data (which is typical at lower levels of granularity), challenges with more complex analytic needs, difficulty mastering the MDX language, and many BI vendors do not cater to cubes. This last point is true of Tableau. Although Tableau can be used with cubes, there are challenges to overcome.

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