The Challenges Never Stop By Craig S. Mullins Data warehousing is indeed becoming common place in large organizations. Additionally, most data warehouses require denormalized data in the form of aggregate tables.
Aggregate tables contain redundant data that is summarized from other data in the warehouse.
However, these tables add to the size of the data warehouse and the complexity of the environment that must be managed. This will eventually take the form of intelligent agents that manage aggregate tables. These agents will recommend when to create and remove aggregate tables, estimate their space usage, automatically create the tables, and asynchronously load data and propagate updates. Until these intelligent agents arrive, DWAs will need to tweak the tools used by DBAs to do the task. These are good candidates for summarization into aggregate tables.