Materialized view design and maintenance in a financial data warehouse system

A data warehouse is a repository of integrated information from distributed, autonomous and possibly heterogeneous sources. One of the problems related with a data warehouse is how to keep views in the data warehouse up-to-date, given the various geographical and operational constraints of the underlying source databases. Two main techniques are used to address this view maintenance problem viz., the auxiliary view technique and the summary-delta table method. We discuss an implementation which makes use of both techniques in a single system: a Financial Data Warehouse System (FDWS), as a hybrid approach to view maintenance. Such an approach applies the two techniques as complements to each other and takes into account the special characteristics of the data warehouse concerned