Mastering Data Warehouse Aggregates: Solutions for Star Schema Performance
by Christopher Adamson
4.5. Summary
Using dimensional aggregates introduces new requirements for the data warehouse architecture. The appropriate table to respond to a given query is a function of the dimensionality of the query, the dimensionality of the aggregate schema design, the relative size of the potential responders, and their availability status.
The purpose of an aggregate navigator is to make these decisions at query execution time. This chapter identified a series of requirements for this capability, and used it to evaluate the three most common styles of aggregate navigation. Additionally, this chapter looked at specific implementations from Oracle and IBM. These implementations have the distinct advantage of building the aggregates, as well as providing aggregate navigation services. In other cases, aggregate construction will be a manual process.
The next two chapters look at the construction process in detail. Aggregate processing will be placed in the context of the overall ETL process in Chapter 5. The steps required to create and maintain the aggregate tables themselves are identified in Chapter 6.
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