Cost effective storage space for data cubes

Abstract

View materialization is one of the most important techniques applied in multidimensional databases. The problem of selecting a set of views for materialization that minimizes queries response time under storage space constraint received significant attention over last twenty years. Many researchers concentrate on designing better view selection methods with respect to the running time or the cost of the solution. This paper summarizes our research on the problem of how much space should be allocated for views materialization to ensure good queries performance. In order to comprehensively investigate the problem and minimize the influence of untypical cases, the experiments described in this paper were done on the large data set, including large data cubes, rarely considered in previous papers. In particular, the relation between the number of data cube views and the space limit expressed as a percentage of the fully materialized data cube size and a multiple of the base view size is analysed. According to our experimental results, the allocation of large space for views materialization is not cost effective.