What are the advantges and disadvantages of a MOLAP storage engine?

The storage engines of MOLAP systems are optimized for the unique characteristics of multidimensional data such as sparsity and complex aggregation across thousands of cells. Because data cubes are precomputed, MOLAP query performance is generally better than competing approaches that use relational database storage. Even with techniques to deal with sparsity, MOLAP engines can be overwhelmed by the size of data cubes. A fully calculated data cube may expand many times as compared to the raw input data. This data explosion problem limits the size of data cubes that MOLAP engines can manipulate.

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