Apparatus and Method for Accessing Materialized and Non-Materialized Values in a Shared Nothing System

A computer readable storage medium includes executable instructions to define an interface to a multi-dimensional cube divided into partitions distributed across nodes supporting a shared nothing multi-dimensional distributed database. The interface includes a metadata module characterizing access paths to data within the multi-dimensional cube and an access path module to convert a data request into an access path protocol to retrieve data from the multi-dimensional cube to satisfy the data request.