Multiagent immediate incremental view maintenance for data warehouses

Data warehouse systems typically designate downtime for view maintenance, ranging from tens of minutes to hours depending on the system size. We develop a multiagent system that achieves immediate incremental view maintenance (IIVM) for continuous updating of data warehouse views. We describe an IIVM system that processes updates as transactions are executed at the underlying data sources to eliminate view maintenance downtime for the data warehouse-a crucial requirement for internet applications. The use of a multiagent framework provides considerable process speed improvement when compared with other IIVM systems. Since agents are used to delegate the data sources and warehouse views, it is easy to reorganize the components of the system. Through the use of cooperative agents, the data consistency of IIVM can be easily maintained. The test results from this research show that the proposed system increases the availability of the data warehouse while preserving a stringent requirement on data consistency.