The Lord of the Rings: Efficient Maintenance of Views at Data Warehouses

Data warehouses have become extremely important to support online analytical processing (OLAP) queries in databases. Since the data view that is obtained at a data warehouse is derived from multiple data sources that are continuously updated, keeping a data warehouse up-to-date becomes a crucial problem. An approach referred to as the incremental view maintenance is widely used. Unfortunately, a precise and formal definition of view maintenance (which can actually be seen as a distributed computation problem) does not exist. This paper develops a formal model for maintaining views at data warehouses in a distributed asynchronous system. We start by formulating the view maintenance problem in terms of abstract update and data integration operations and state the notions of correctness associated with data warehouse views. We then present a basic protocol and establish its proof of correctness. Finally, we present an efficient version of the proposed protocol by incorporating several optimizations. So, this paper is mainly concerned with basic principles of distributed computing and their use to solve database