Multi-query optimization for on-line analytical processing

Multi-dimensional expressions (MDX) provide an interface for asking several related OLAP queries simultaneously. An interesting problem is how to optimize the execution of an MDX query, given that most data warehouses maintain a set of redundant materialized views to accelerate OLAP operations. A number of greedy and approximation algorithms have been proposed for different versions of the problem. In this paper we evaluate experimentally their performance, concluding that they do not scale well for realistic workloads. Motivated by this fact, we develop two novel greedy algorithms. Our algorithms construct the execution plan in a top-down manner by identifying in each step the most beneficial view, instead of finding the most promising query. We show by extensive experimentation that our methods outperform the existing ones in most cases. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.