Pre-aggregations—also known as aggregate tables—play a critical role in scaling modern analytics. By summarizing raw data into smaller, query-ready rollup tables, pre-aggregations make it possible to deliver fast, responsive dashboards and analytics—even for large datasets.

However, how you store and manage pre-aggregations is just as important as creating them. Many teams rely on their data warehouse for this task, but this can introduce inefficiencies, complexities, and unnecessary costs. Teams often find themselves juggling multiple rollup tables, rising costs, and complex query logic just to maintain performance.

Cube Store offers a smarter, more efficient solution. Seamlessly integrated with Cube, this caching layer is purpose-built to handle pre-aggregated data. With Cube Store, you can simplify workflows, reduce costs, and deliver faster query performance. In this blog, we’ll explore the challenges of traditional pre-aggregation storage, how Cube Store solves these problems, and the benefits it brings to modern analytics use cases.

Why Storing Pre-Aggregated Data in Data Warehouses Is Inefficient

Data warehouses are designed for raw data storage and transformation, but they are not always the best fit for managing pre-aggregations. Here are the key challenges teams often face:

1. Managing Multiple Granularities

Analytics teams often need pre-aggregations at different levels of granularity. For instance, you might need daily, weekly, and monthly summaries to support various dashboards and reports.

Storing these different rollups in a data warehouse means:

  • Creating and maintaining multiple tables for each level of granularity.
  • Manually managing queries to ensure they access the correct rollup table.

This approach not only adds complexity but also increases the risk of errors or inefficiencies. For example, inconsistent naming conventions or overlooked table updates can result in slow dashboards or inaccurate reports.

2. Rising Costs

Storing pre-aggregated tables in a data warehouse can lead to higher costs in two ways:

  • Storage Costs: Each rollup table duplicates data at a different granularity, increasing storage requirements significantly over time.
  • Compute Costs: Maintaining and querying these tables requires additional compute resources, particularly for organizations with high query volumes or frequent data refreshes.

For instance, refreshing daily and monthly rollups from raw data may double the compute required compared to Cube Store’s approach of deriving monthly data from daily rollups. These costs may seem manageable initially, but as datasets and workloads grow, they can quickly escalate.

3. Query Complexity

For tools and applications to make use of pre-aggregations, they need to know which rollup table to query. Some BI tools offer a feature called aggregate awareness to help with this, but many do not—and those that do require significant setup to enable it. Without such features, developers or analysts must manually configure queries to target specific pre-aggregated tables, increasing the complexity of analytics workflows. This can delay insights and frustrate teams trying to streamline their analytics pipelines.

How Cube Store Simplifies Pre-Aggregation Management

Cube Store, as part of Cube, provides a purpose-built solution for managing rollup tables. It integrates seamlessly with Cube’s data modeling layer to simplify workflows and improve efficiency.

1. Automating Rollups for Flexible Granularities

With Cube, you only need to define the most granular pre-aggregation—such as daily data. Cube Store automatically handles queries that require less granular data, like weekly or monthly summaries.

This means you can:

  • Avoid creating multiple rollup tables for different granularities.
  • Rely on Cube to roll up granular data automatically for higher-level queries, such as summing daily sales to calculate monthly totals.

By reducing the need for redundant pre-aggregations, Cube Store simplifies setup and management while improving efficiency. This not only reduces manual effort but also minimizes the risk of misconfigured queries.

2. Simplifying Query Workflows

Whether you’re powering embedded analytics in an application or supporting dashboards in a BI tool, Cube Store simplifies the querying process. Applications and tools query Cube, and Cube automatically directs those queries to the most relevant rollup table.

For embedded analytics, this means end users experience seamless performance without needing to understand the underlying data structure. For BI tools, it eliminates the need for developers to configure complex logic or handle the nuances of aggregate awareness, enabling smoother workflows across environments.

3. Flexible Refresh Options

Keeping pre-aggregations up-to-date can be challenging, but Cube makes it easy with highly customizable refresh logic. You can:

  • Schedule refreshes at intervals that suit your data’s update frequency (e.g., hourly or daily).
  • Trigger refreshes based on specific events, such as when new data is ingested into your source database.
  • Use Cube’s Orchestration API to initiate refreshes programmatically, ensuring updates align with your unique data workflows.

This flexibility ensures your analytics are always powered by the freshest data, without unnecessary overhead or wasted compute resources.

Why Cube Store Improves Performance and Reduces Costs

By offloading pre-aggregations to Cube Store, you unlock key advantages for both performance and cost efficiency:

1. Accelerated Query Performance

Cube Store is optimized for analytics workloads, allowing it to handle high-concurrency queries efficiently. Whether you’re powering dashboards in a BI tool or embedded analytics in an application, Cube Store ensures fast, reliable query responses—even as workloads scale.

2. Potential Cost Savings

Since Cube Store handles pre-aggregations, your data warehouse is no longer burdened with storing and querying multiple rollup tables. This reduces both storage and compute usage, potentially leading to significant cost savings.

For instance, a customer using Cube achieved not only a 2x reduction in data warehouse costs but also faster dashboard performance by offloading rollup management to Cube Store—read the full case study.

Built for Diverse Analytics Use Cases

Cube Store supports a wide range of analytics scenarios, making it an adaptable and powerful solution for modern teams:

  • Embedded Analytics: Cube Store is purpose-built for high-concurrency applications, ensuring low-latency responses even under heavy query volumes. It also supports multi-tenancy use cases with rollup tables that align with access rules defined in the data model, enabling secure and efficient data partitioning.
  • Business Intelligence: Cube’s SQL API is designed to work seamlessly with a variety of BI tools, supporting flexible query formats that take full advantage of pre-aggregated data in Cube Store. This eliminates the need for exact query matches with rollup tables, streamlining analytics workflows and reducing setup complexity.
  • Spreadsheet Integration with OLAP Functionality: For users who rely on spreadsheets for analysis, Cube’s MDX API offers robust OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) capabilities. This enables spreadsheet tools to connect to Cube as easily as they would to platforms like Microsoft Analysis Services, providing dynamic, multidimensional analysis directly from rollup tables.

Across these use cases, Cube Store empowers teams with seamless rollup selection, optimized query performance, and a simplified analytics workflow. No matter your analytics scenario, Cube Store scales with your needs to deliver fast, reliable insights.

Conclusion

Pre-aggregations are essential for modern analytics, but managing them doesn’t have to be complex or costly. By using Cube Store as part of Cube, you gain:

  • Automation: Flexible rollups, customizable refresh logic, and simplified querying.
  • Performance: Fast, reliable query responses for high-concurrency workloads.
  • Cost Efficiency: Lower data warehouse expenses by offloading rollup table storage and querying.

Getting started is simple: Cube Store fits seamlessly into Cube’s unified analytics architecture, so teams can focus on insights, not infrastructure. Ready to take your analytics to the next level? Explore Cube Store and Cube Cloud today.