A maintenance centric approach to the view selection problem

Author-Highlights••We present a View Selection Problem model which minimizes and bounds update time.••We also propose a constructor heuristic intent on reducing update costs.••Comparisons with the state-of-the-art are made using 6 clinical database query sets.••The model notably decreases update time with negligible, if any, impact on queries.••The constructor heuristic yields superior results to extant methods.

The View Selection Problem is an optimization problem designed to enhance query performance through the pre-computation and storage of select views given resource constraints. Assuring the materialized views can be updated within a reasonable time frame has become a chief concern for recent models. However, these methods are crafted simply to fit a solution within a feasible range and not to minimize the resource intensive maintenance process. In this paper, we submit two novel advances in terms of model formulation and solution generation to reduce maintenance costs. Our proposed model, the Minimum-Maintenance View Selection Problem, combines previous techniques to minimize and constrain update costs. Furthermore, we define a series of maintenance time reducing principles in solution generation embodied in a constructor heuristic. The model and constructor heuristic are evaluated using an existing clinical data warehouse and state-of-the-art heuristics. Our analysis shows our model produces the lowest-cost solution relative to extant models. Also, they indicate algorithms seeded with our constructor heuristic to be superior solutions to all other methods tested.