The Strobe Algorithms for Multi-Source Warehouse Consistency

Abstract

A warehouse is a data repository containing integrated information for effcient querying and analysis. Maintaining the consistency of warehouse data is challenging, especially if the data sources are autonomous and views of the data at the warehouse span multiple sources. Transactions containing multiple updates at one or more sources, e.g., batch updates, complicate the consistency problem. In this paper we identify and discuss three fundamental transaction processing scenarios for data warehousing. We define four levels of consistency for warehouse data and present a new family of algorithms, the Strobe family, that maintain consistency as the warehouse is updated, under the various warehousing scenarios. All of the algorithms are incremental and can handle a continuous and overlapping stream of updates from the sources. Our implementation shows that the algorithms are practical and realistic choices for a wide variety of update scenarios