MOLAP Servers: These servers directly support the multidimensional view of data through a multidimensional storage engine. This makes it possible to implement front-end multidimensional queries on the storage layer through direct mapping. An example of such a server is Essbase (Arbor). Such an approach has the advantage of excellent indexing properties, but provides poor storage utilization, especially when the data set is sparse. Many MOLAP servers adopt a 2-level
storage representation to adapt to sparse data sets and use compression extensively. In the two-level storage representation, a set of one or two dimensional subarrays that are likely to be dense are identified, through the use of design tools or by user input, and are represented in the array format. Then, the traditional indexing structure is used to index onto these “smaller” arrays. Many of the techniques that were devised for statistical databases appear to be relevant for MOLAP servers.