On index structures for star query processing in data warehouses

Abstract

One of the important research and technological issues in data warehouse performance is the optimization of analytical queries. Most of the research have been focusing on optimizing such queries by means of materialized views, data and index partitioning, as well as various index structures including: join indexes, bitmap join indexes, multidimensional indexes or index-based multidimensional clusters. These structures neither well support navigation along dimension hierarchies nor optimize joins with the Time dimension, which in practice is used in the majority of analytical queries. In this chapter we overview the basic index structures, namely: a bitmap index, a join index, and a bitmap join index. Based on these indexes, we show how to build another index, called Time-HOBI, for optimizing queries that address the Time dimension and compute aggregates along dimension hierarchies. We further discuss the extension of the index with additional data structure for storing aggregate values along the hierarchical structure of the index. The aggregates are used for speeding up aggregate queries along dimension hierarchies. Furthermore, we show how the index is used for answering queries in an example data warehouse. Finally, we discuss its performance-related characteristics, based on experiments. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.