PARTIAL DELEGATION OF COMPLEX OLAP QUERIES WITH APPLICATION TO ZERO SUPPRESSION CONDITION EVALUATION

The present invention introduces a mechanism to partition the processing work required on data from a variety of proprietary OLAP data sources in such a way that as much as possible of the processing can be carried out by the OLAP data source, thereby improving the efficiency of the delegated portion of the operations, and making more effective use of the overall processing power of the computing facilities. By decomposing the required high level expressions into sub-expressions to be applied to data elements some part of the expressions can be evaluated by the OLAP data source. The results of these sub-expressions are combined by the OLAP data engine to produce the same result as the original full expression. ‘Rows’ and ‘columns’ of the original cross-tabulation formed from the data are classified as either simple—meaning the expression can be processed at the OLAP data source or complex—meaning such expressions cannot be computed at the OLAP data source.