Processing reporting function views in a data warehouse environment

Abstract

Reporting functions reflect a novel technique to formulate sequence-oriented queries in SQL. They extend the classical way of grouping and applying aggregation functions by additionally providing a column-based ordering, partitioning, and windowing mechanism. The application area of reporting functions ranges from simple ranking queries (TOP(n)-analyses) over cumulative (Year-To-Date-analyses) to sliding window queries. We discuss the problem of deriving reporting function queries from materialized reporting function views, which is one of the most important issues in efficiently processing queries in a data warehouse environment. Two different derivation algorithms, including their relational mappings are introduced and compared in a test scenario.