Abstract: An aggregation engine for a data warehouse which provides an indexing technique which allows the measures in a fact table data entry to be added to the appropriate aggregate bucket by mapping the each of the dimension keys to an aggregate index within a level in that dimension and then calculating an overall index using the aggregate index from each dimension which is then mapped onto the aggregate bucket in question. A rolling cache is also provided allowing frequently or recently used aggregate buckets to be represented in memory rather than in a file, and merged with the equivalent bucket in an aggregate file when necessary, so that the slower access to the address file and the aggregate files can be avoided.

Abstract: A file management system allows the linking of objects. In each link one object serves as a parent and the other as a child. When a parent object is copied the parent object is copied to produce a copy of the parent object. Additionally, the child objects of the parent object are copied s well, except in the case when the child object is designated as a special public object, each child of the parent object is copied to produce a copy of the child object. Each copy of a child object is then linked to the copy of the parent object. When a child object is designated as a special public object, the child object is linked to the copy of the parent object.