Efficient Utilization of Materialized Views in a Data Warehouse

View Materialization is an effective method to increase query efficiency in a data warehouse. However, one encounters the problem of space insufficiency if all possible views are materialized in advance. Reducing query time by means of selecting a proper set of materialized views with a lower cost is crucial for efficient data warehousing. In addition, the costs of data warehouse creation, query, and maintenance have to be taken into account while views are materialized. The purpose of this research is to select a proper set of materialized views under the storage and cost constraints and to help speedup the entire data warehousing process. We hereby propose a cost model for data warehouse query and maintenance along with an efficient view selection algorithm called Mid-Point Locating Algorithm with Candidate View (MPLA-CV), which uses the gain and loss indices. The main contribution of our paper is to speedup the selection process of materialized views. The second one is to reduce the total cost of data warehouse query and maintenance. In our experiment, there is an average speedup rate of 57.1% without considering maintenance cost. The improvement rate of speedup is 47.4% if maintenance cost is considered. Using the selected set of materialized views, we have an average improvement rate of 25.5% with respect to the query and maintenance costs.