Dean of Basic Sciences,

A data warehouse uses multiple materialized views to efficiently process a given set of queries. The materialization of all views is not possible because of the space constraint and maintenance cost constraint. Materialized views selection is one of the crucial decisions in designing a data warehouse for optimal efficiency. Selecting a suitable set of views that minimizes the total cost associated with the materialized views is the key objective of data warehousing. In this paper, we present a framework for selecting views to materialize so as to achieve the best combination of good query response, low query processing cost and low view maintenance cost in a given storage space constraints. The framework takes into account all the cost metrics associated with the materialized views selection, including query execution frequencies, base-relation update frequencies, query access costs, view maintenance costs and the system’s storage space constraints. The framework selects the most cost effective views to materialize and thus optimizes the maintenance, storage and query processing cost, thereby resulting in an efficient data warehousing system. Keywords