Exploitation of Referential Integrity Constraints for Efficient Update of Data Warehouse Views

Abstract

Data warehouse (DW) views provide an efficient access to information integrated from source data. As changes are made to the source data, the corresponding views may be outdated. Hence, the maintenance of DW views is crucial for the currency of information. In this paper, we propose a novel method to efficiently self-maintain DW views that contain select-project-joins over relations modelled in a star schema. Specifically, our method avoids computing the views from scratch, which can be very costly. Instead, it exploits the referential integrity constraints that are imposed on the relations. Therefore, with our proposed method, DW views can be updated or refreshed by using only the old materialised views and the files that keep the truly relevant tuples in the “delta”. The method avoids accessing the underlying source data, and hence, achieves efficient update of DW views that contain joins over relations modelled in a star schema.