Chapter 7. Summary Management

Summary Tables

A common technique used in data warehouses is to precompute and store results of frequent queries. This is especially beneficial when the queries involve aggregation, because the result is usually much smaller than the detailed data used to produce the result. An example of such a query is a monthly sales report for a business. Since multiple users are interested in the total sales of each product for each month, the data would be selected, joined, sorted, and aggregated over and over again for each user. Rather than wasting resources reexecuting the same query repeatedly the result could be precomputed and saved in a table. Such precomputed results are often called summaries or summary tables.

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