Maintenance of Data Cubes and Summary Tables in a Warehouse

Data warehouses contain large amounts of information, often collected from a variety of independent sources. Decision-support functions in a warehouse, such as on-line analytical processing OLAP, involve hundreds of complex aggregate queries over large volumes of data. It is not feasible to compute these queries by scanning the data sets each time. Warehouse applications therefore build a large number of summary tables, or materialized aggregate views, to help them increase the system performance. As changes, most notably new transactional data, are collected at the data sources, all summary tables at the warehouse that depend upon this data need to be updated. Usually, source changes are loaded into the warehouse at regular intervals, usually once a day, in a batch window, and the warehouse is made unavailable for querying while it is updated. Since the number of summary tables that need to be maintained is often large, a critical issue for data warehousing is how to maintain the s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Inderpal Singh Mumick, Dallan Quass, Barinderpal Singh Mumick
• Keywords: Aggregate Views, Database, SIGMOD 1997, Summary Tables, Warehouse