Physical Database Design for Data Warehouses

Data warehouses collect copies of information from remote sources into a single database. Since the remote data is cached at the warehouse, it appears as local relations to the users of the warehouse. To improve query response time, the warehouse administrator will often materialize views defined on the local relations to support common or complicated queries. Unfortunately, the requirement to keep the views consistent with the local relations creates additional overhead when the remote sources change. The warehouse is often kept only loosely consistent with the sources: it is periodically refreshed with changes sent from the source. When this happens, the warehouse is taken off-line until the local relations and materialized views can be updated. Clearly, the users would prefer as little down time as possible. Often the down time can be reduced by adding carefully selected materialized views or indexes to the physical schema. This paper studies how to select the sets of supporting views and of indexes to materialize to minimize the down time. We call this the view index selection (VIS) problem. We present an A* search based solution to the problem as well as rules of thumb. We also perform additional experiments to understand the space-time tradeoff as it applies to data warehouses.