On the Importance of Tuning in Incremental View Maintenance: An Experience Case Study

We describe the tuning of a gigabyte-scale TPC-D database for investigation of incremental maintenance of a materialized view. We find that incremental maintenance is feasible over a wide range of update sizes (granularities), that intuitive SQL formulations perform poorly, but that there are better alternatives. We show that these results can be meaningfully evaluated and presented only in the context of reasonable instance tuning.