Maintaining views in object-relational databases

摘要

View materialization is an important way of improving the performance of query processing. When an update occurs to the source data from which a materialized view is derived, the materialized view has to be updated so that it is consistent with the source data. This update process is called view maintenance. The incremental method of view maintenance, which computes the new view using the old view and the update to the source data, is widely preferred to full view recomputation when the update is small in size. In this paper we investigate how to incrementally maintain views in object-relational (OR) databases. The investigation focuses on maintaining views defined in OR-SQL, a language containing the features of object referencing, inheritance, collection, and aggregate functions including user-defined set aggregate functions. We propose an architecture and algorithms for incremental OR view maintenance. We implement all algorithms and analyze the performance of them in comparison with full view recomputation. The analysis shows that the algorithms significantly reduce the cost of updating a view when the size of an update to the source data is relatively small.