Techniques are provided which address the problems associated with the conventional approaches for storing multidimensional data in a relational database system. According to technique, the many foreign key values of each row in the fact table are mapped to and replaced by a nullreplacementnull value. A mapping function is provided that derives a replacement value from any given combination of foreign key values, and an inverse mapping function is provided to reproduce the combination of foreign key values given the replacement value. A mapping function is selected such that the foreign key value combinations of multidimensional values that are conceptually related to each other map to values that are close to each other. The rows in the fact table are then stored within the fact table in the sorted order, thus causing values that are conceptually related to each other to be stored physically near each other within the fact table. Various techniques are provided for generating the replacement value from the foreign key values by subdividing the multidimensional cube that contains all of the multidimensional values into smaller sub-cubes that are referred to as tiles. Variations on the tiling mechanism are provided. According to one approach, the cube is sub-divided into tiles based on the members of a particular level of a hierarchical dimension. According to another tiling approach, the tiles themselves may be subdivided into smaller tiles to create a hierarchy of tiles.