Abstract: Techniques for a method for efficiently extracting data from multidimensional databases are disclosed herein. When extracting data from a subset of a multidimensional database, the method first extracts data from high-level cells within the subset. If there are any empty high-level cells, the method removes lower-level cells that roll-up into the empty high-level cell, without extracting data from these lower-level cells. The method improves the data extraction efficiency by reducing the overhead of extracting data from empty cells of multidimensional databases.