Mastering Data Warehouse Aggregates
Solutions for Star Schema Performance
Chapter One
Fundamentals of Aggregates
A decade ago, Ralph Kimball described aggregate tables as "the single most
dramatic way to improve performance in a large data warehouse." Writing in
DBMS Magazine ("Aggregate Navigation with (Almost) No Metadata,"
August 1996), Kimball continued:
Aggregates can have a very significant effect on performance, in some cases
speeding queries by a factor of one hundred or even one thousand. No other
means exist to harvest such spectacular gains.
This statement rings as true today as it did ten years ago. Since then,
advances in hardware and software have dramatically improved the capacity
and performance of the data warehouse. Aggregates compound the effect of
these improvements, providing performance gains that fully harness capabilities
of the underlying technologies.
And the pressure to improve data warehouse performance is as strong as
ever. As the baseline performance of underlyin ... read full excerpt from Mastering Data Warehouse Aggregates: Solutions for Star Schema Performance ebook
