Cost Models for Selecting Materialized Views in Public Clouds

Data warehouse performance is usually achieved through physical data structures such as indexes or materialized views. In such a context, cost models can help select a relevant set of these performance optimization structures. Nevertheless, this selection becomes more complex in the cloud. The criterion to optimize is indeed at least two-dimensional, with monetary cost balancing overall query response time. This paper introduces new cost models that fit into the pay-as-you-go paradigm of cloud computing. Based on these cost models, an optimization problem is defined to discover, among candidate views, those to be materialized to minimize both the overall cost of using and maintaining the database in a public cloud and the total response time of a given query workload. We experimentally show that maintaining materialized views is always advantageous, both in terms of performance and cost.