Summary

4.8 Summary

Summary Management in Oracle 9i provides a very powerful set of tools to improve query performance in your warehouse. Materialized views can be used to precompute the results of frequently asked queries. With query rewrite, the queries will be transparently rewritten to use the materialized views. Fast refresh and partition change tracking allow the summary tables to be kept up-to-date when your warehouse gets loaded. Dimensions allow you to represent hierarchical information about your data to take advantage of rollup relationships during query rewrite. The Summary Advisor can be used to recommend the right materialized views for your application.

In the next chapter, we will discuss in detail the various activities involved in loading new data into the warehouse.