Using partial information to update materialized views

This paper lays the theoretical foundations for identifying classes of views and data partitioning strategies that allow efficient incremental view maintenance using ''partial information'' about the underlying base relations. We present necessary and sufficient conditions for determining how a materialized select-project-join view can be updated using only the view definition, the current view materialization, and the update (i.e., no base relations); and also how to update views using only the view definition, the update, and the updated base relation (i.e., not the other base relations). We generalize the above results to use an arbitrary subset of the base relations and the current view materialization. Our results are especially useful in distributed databases, in disconnected and mobile computing environments where the underlying database is not always accessible, and in data warehousing applications. Our techniques can be used to minimize remote data access and often to completely avoid remote access. This paper gives the intuition and theory necessary for identifying and designing views that are efficiently maintainable using partial information.