View Selection and Materialization

Abstract

There are many motivations for investigating the view selection problem. At first, materialized views are increasingly being supported by commercial database systems and are used to speed up query response time. Therefore, the problem of choosing an appropriate set of views to materialize in the database is crucial in order to improve query processing cost. Another application of the view selection issue is selecting views to materialize in data warehousing systems to answer decision support queries. The problem addressed in this paper is similar to that of deciding which views to materialize in data warehousing. However, most existing view selection methods are static. Moreover, none of these methods have considered the problem of de-materializing the already materialized views. Yet it is a very important issue since the size of storage space is usually restricted. This chapter deals with the problem of dynamic view selection and with the pending issue of removing materialized views in order to replace less beneficial views with more beneficial ones. We propose a view selection method for deciding which views to materialize according to statistic metadata. More precisely, we have designed and implemented our view selection method, including a polynomial algorithm, to decide which views to materialize.