The concept of multidimensional databases has been extensively researched and wildly used in actual database
application. It plays an important role in contemporary information technology, but due to the complexity of its inner
structure, the database design is a complicated process and users are having a hard time fully understanding and using
the database. An effective visualization tool for higher dimensional information system helps database designers and
users alike. Most visualization techniques focus on displaying dimensional data using spreadsheets and charts. This may
be sufficient for the databases having three or fewer dimensions but for higher dimensions, various combinations of
projection operations are needed and a full grasp of total database architecture is very difficult. This study reviews
existing visualization techniques for multidimensional database and then proposes an alternate approach to visualize a
database of any dimension by adopting the tool proposed by Kiviat for software engineering processes. In this
diagramming method, each dimension is represented by one branch of concentric spikes. This paper documents a C++
based visualization tool with extensive use of OpenGL graphics library and GUI functions. Detailed examples of actual
databases demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness in visualizing multidimensional databases.
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