A Data Mining Approach for Selecting Bitmap Join Indices

Index selection is one of the most important decisions to take in the physical design of relational data warehouses. Indices reduce significantly the cost of processing complex OLAP queries, but require storage cost and induce maintenance overhead. Two main types of indices are available: mono-attribute indices (e.g., B-tree, bitmap, hash, etc.) and multi-attribute indices (join indices, bitmap join indices). To optimize star join queries characterized by joins between a large fact table and multiple dimension tables and selections on dimension tables, bitmap join indices are well adapted. They require less storage cost due to their binary representation. However, selecting these indices is a difficult task due to the exponential number of candidate attributes to be indexed. Most of approaches for index selection follow two main steps: (1) pruning the search space (i.e., reducing the number of candidate attributes) and (2) selecting indices using the pruned search space. In this paper, we first propose a data mining driven approach to prune the search space of bitmap join index selection problem. As opposed to an existing our technique that only uses frequency of attributes in queries as a pruning metric, our technique uses not only frequencies, but also other parameters such as the size of dimension tables involved in the indexing process, size of each dimension tuple, and page size on disk. We then define a greedy algorithm to select bitmap join indices that minimize processing cost and verify storage constraint. Finally, in order to evaluate the efficiency of our approach, we compare it with some existing techniques.