A Comprehensive Analysis of Materialized Views in a Data Warehouse Environment

Abstract

Data in a warehouse can be perceived as a collection of materialized views that are generated as per the user requirements specified in the queries being generated against the information contained in the warehouse. User requirements and constraints frequently change over time, which may evolve data and view definitions stored in a data warehouse dynamically. The current requirements are modified and some novel and innovative requirements are added in order to deal with the latest business scenarios. In fact, data preserved in a warehouse along with these materialized views must also be updated and maintained so that they can deal with the changes in data sources as well as the requirements stated by the users. Selection and maintenance of these views is one of the vital tasks in a data warehousing environment in order to provide optimal efficiency by reducing the query response time, query processing and maintenance costs as well. Another major issue related to materialized views is that whether these views should be recomputed for every change in the definition or base relations, or they should be adapted incrementally from existing views. In this paper, we have examined several ways o performing changes in materialized views their selection and maintenance in data warehousing environments. We have also provided a comprehensive study on research works of different authors on various parameters and presented the same in a tabular manner.