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In this article, we present the design and implementation of SISYPHUS, a storage manager for data cubes that provides an efficient physical base for performing on-line analytical processing (OLAP) operations. OLAP poses new requirements to the physical storage layer of a database management system. Special characteristics of OLAP cubes such as multidimensionality, hierarchical structure of dimensions, data sparseness, etc., are difficult to handle with ordinary record-oriented storage managers. The SISYPHUS storage manager is based on a chunk-based data model that enables the hierarchical clustering of data with a very low storage cost. In this article we present the implementation of SISYPHUS’ chunk-oriented file system as well as present the core architecture of the system and reason on various design choices and implementation solutions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]