Data Warehouse Configuration

In the data warehousing approach to the integration of data from multiple information sources, selected information is extracted in advance and stored in a repository. A data warehouse (DW) can therefore be seen as a set of materialized views defined over the sources. When a query is posed, it is evaluated locally, using the materialized views, without accessing the original information sources. The applications using DWs require high query performance. This requirement is in conflict with the need to maintain in the DW updated information. The DW configuration problem is the problem of selecting a set of views to materialize in the DW that answers all the queries of interest while minimizing the total query evaluation and view maintenance cost. In this paper we provide a theoretical framework for this problem in terms of the relational model. We develop a method for dealing with it by formulating it as a state space optimization problem and then solving it using an exhaustive incremental algorithm as well as a *Research supported by the European Commission under the ESPRIT Program LTR project No 22469 “DWQ: Foundations of Data Warehouse Quality” Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 23rd VLDB Conference Athens, Greece, 1997 heuristic one. We extend this method by considering the case where auxiliary views are stored in the DW solely for reducing the view maintenance cost.