Computing closest common subexpressions for view selection problems

Selecting a set of views for materialization is a required task in many current database and data warehousing applications including the design of a data warehouse, and the maintenance of multiple materialized views. The selected views can be materialized permanently or transiently depending on the specific view selection problem. The view selection algorithms are expensive due to the size of the search space of the problem.In this paper we propose an approach for generating candidate views for materialization for view selection problems based on the definition of the input queries. We also provide rewritings of the input queries using the generated candidate views. In generating candidate views, we do not apply costbased techniques but we try to maximize the operations in the views. Subsequently, view selection algorithms can exploit problem dependent cost functions to choose among the generated candidate views. Our approach is not restricted to a specific view selection problem. Compared to a previous one, it generates views that involve more relation occurrences (or operations) and can reduce the size of the search space which can be very large. We implement our approach and we report some experimental evaluation with comparison to previous works.