Materialized View Selection for Data Warehouse Design

A data warehouse (DW) is a repository of information retrieved from multiple, possibly heterogeneous, autonomous, distributed databases and other information sources for the purpose of complex querying, analysis, and decision support. Data in the DW are selectively collected from the sources, processed in order to resolve inconsistencies, and integrated in advance (at design time) before data loading. DW data are usually organized multi-dimensionally to support online analytical processing (OLAP). A DW can be seen abstractly as a set of materialized views defined over the source relations. During the initial design of a DW, the DW designer faces the problem of deciding which views to materialize in the DW. This problem has been addressed in the literature for different classes of queries and views, and with different design goals.