View Maintenance In A Warehousing Environment

Abstract

A warehouse is a repository of integrated information drawn from remote data sources. Since a warehouse effectively implements materialized views, we must maintain the views as the data sources are updated. This view maintenance problem differs from the traditional one in that the view definition and the base data are now decoupled. We show that this decoupling can result in anomalies if traditional algorithms are applied. We introduce a new algorithm, ECA (for "Eager Compensating Algorithm"), that eliminates the anomalies. ECA is based on previous incremental view maintenance algorithms, but extra "compensating" queries are used to eliminate anomalies. We also introduce two streamlined versions of ECA for special cases of views and updates, and we present an initial performance study that compares ECA to a view recomputation algorithm in terms of messages transmitted, data transferred, and I/O costs.