Dimensions Based Data Clustering and Zone Maps

In recent years, the data warehouse industry has witnessed decreased use of indexing but increased use of compression and clustering of data facilitating efficient data access and data pruning in the query processing area. A classic example of data pruning is the partition pruning, which is used when table data is range or list partitioned. But lately, techniques have been developed to prune data at a lower granularity than a table partition or sub-partition. A good example is the use of data pruning structure called zone map. A zone map prunes zones of data from a table on which it is defined. Data pruning via zone map is very effective when the table data is clustered by the filtering columns. The database industry has offered support to cluster data in tables by its local columns, and to define zone maps on clustering columns of such tables. This has helped improve the performance of queries that contain filter predicates on local columns. However, queries in data warehouses are typically based on star/snowflake schema with filter predicates usually on columns of the dimension tables joined to a fact table. Given this, the performance of data warehouse queries can be significantly improved if the fact table data is clustered by columns of dimension tables together with zone maps that maintain min/max value ranges of these clustering columns over zones of fact table data. In recognition of this opportunity of significantly improving the performance of data warehouse queries, Oracle 12c release 1 has introduced the support for dimension based clustering of fact tables together with data pruning of the fact tables via dimension based zone maps.