When is it time to rethink the aggregate configuration of your OLAP server?

OLAP servers based on relational backends typically exploit materialized aggregate tables to improve response times of complex analytical queries. One of the key problems in this context is the view selection problem: choosing the optimal set of aggregation tables (called configuration) for a given workload. In this paper, we present a system that continuously monitors the workload and raises a quantified alert, when a better configuration is available. We address the tasks of query monitoring and view selection at the OLAP level instead of the SQL level, which simplifies the containment checks as well as rewriting and in this way helps to reduce the complexity of the backend system. At the demo we plan to show how our system works, i.e., how the system reacts upon arbitrary (interactive) workloads and how the user is alerted that a better configuration is available.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: PVLDB
• Authors: Katja Hose, Daniel Klan, Matthias Marx, Kai-Uwe Sattler
• Keywords: Better Configuration, Complex Analytical Queries, PVLDB 2008, View Selection Problem