Efficient computation of view subsets

Over the past ten to fifteen years, data warehouse platformshave grown enormously, both in terms of their importance and their sheer size. Traditionally, such systems have been based upon a dimensional model known as the Star Schema that consists of a central fact table and a series of related dimension tables. Given the enormous size of the fact table, virtually all current systems augment the primary fact table with a small number of focused summary tables. Previous research has addressed the issue of the selection or identification of the most cost-effective summaries. However, the problem of efficiently computing a given view subset has received far less attention. In this paper, we present a suite of greedy algorithms for the construction of these view subsets. Experimental results demonstrate cost savings of between 20% and 70% relative to the naive alternatives, depending upon the degree of materialization required.