An incomplete data cube is also a multidimensional hierarchy of aggregate values. But in an incomplete data cube regions of the hierarchy, and the source data from which those regions are derived, are missing. For example, a data cube administrator may decide that hourly sales data from two years ago is no longer needed, daily sales data will suffice. The administrator can remove the aged, hourly data from the cube. The missing region makes the data cube incomplete and some queries (e.g., what are the hourly sales figures over the lifetime of the enterprise) can no longer be satisfied. Incomplete cubes have mechanisms for handling queries in the missing regions, such as suggesting alternative, complete queries and computing partial results.

In terms of storage, an incomplete cube has the same desirable behaviour as lazy and semi-eager cubes. Each materialises only part of what would be stored in an eager cube; the incomplete or unmaterialised portions incur no storage cost. For example, assume that a regional sales officer wants aggregate data for sales at stores in her region for every hour in 1995, but for stores in other regions, aggregate data for each day will suffice. In an eager cube an aggregate value for every combination of store and hour must be stored resulting in a much larger cube than needed. In contrast, an incomplete cube only stores the relatively small amount of data specified as needed, the hourly data for the other stores forms an incomplete region. Incomplete, lazy, and semi-eager cubes also scale well, new dimensions can be added to the cube and existing dimensions can increase in size (i.e., a more precise measure can be added to the dimension) with no adjustment to the existing cube storage. The resulting cube is merely incomplete in the new dimension, and can be populated as needed later.

But in one important respect an incomplete data cube is like an eager data cube, and unlike a lazy or semi-eager cube. Eager and incomplete cubes do not need the source data from which aggregate values in the cube are derived. Both lazy and semi-eager cubes presume that the source data is still available, so that an aggregate value which is not stored in the cube can be computed when needed. Both strategies tightly couple the cube to a data source. Eager and incomplete cubes, on the other hand, uncouple the cube from the source data.

In general, an incomplete cube is useful in situations where a complete, eager cube would be unnecessarily large, but where a lazy or semi-eager cube cannot be used because the source data is not available or expensive to query. We conjecture that an incomplete data cube would be useful in the following scenarios, among others.

• One reason that data cubes are popular is that many data collections are characterised by the property that as data in the collection ages, each datum individually becomes less relevant, but remains relevant in aggregate. For such data collections, a data cube can be used to store the aggregated historical data, allowing the original data to be archived or deleted and resulting in considerable savings in space.
• A data cube is used to summarise data from a log file or flat file. For example, suppose that a data cube is used to store aggregate data from a log file of sales transactions rather than a sales relation. To search a large log file and retrieve data during query evaluation imposes a heavy burden on system resources, so the data cube's administrator decides to use an incomplete data cube and package requests for more data in an overnight cron job.
• Aggregate data is broadcast on a network by various sites. The aggregate data from external sites is collected and inserted into a cube at each site, but the source data is not shipped across the network for a number of reasons (privacy, cost of broadcasting and duplicating the source data at each site, etc.).
• The cube contains regions of secret data and the authorisation to view the secret data varies from user to user, that is, some users can see all of the data, others only a portion, still others a different portion, etc. In an incomplete cube, it is easy to create a different, incomplete view of the same complete cube for each class of authorised user. The data can be kept secret by hiding it in an incomplete region.