Enabling Self-Service BI on Document Stores

The growing use of document stores has resulted in vast amounts of semi-structured data holding precious information, which could be profitably integrated into existing BI systems. Unfortunately, due to their schemaless nature, document stores are hardly accessible via direct OLAP querying. In this paper we propose an interactive, schema-on-read approach for finding multidimensional structures in document stores aimed at enabling OLAP querying in the context of self-service BI. Our approach works in three steps: multidimensional enrichment, querying, and OLAP enabling; the validation of user queries and the detection of multidimensional structures is based on the mining of approximate functional dependencies from data. The efficiency of our approach is discussed with reference to real datasets.