Optimal Synchronization Policies for Data Warehouses

  • Authors:
  • Debabrata Dey;Zhongju Zhang;Prabuddha De

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Business, University of Washington, Box 353200, Seattle, Washington 98195-3200, USA;School of Business, University of Connecticut, Stamford, Connecticut 06901-2315, USA;Krannert School of Management, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-2056, USA

  • Venue:
  • INFORMS Journal on Computing
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The notion of a data warehouse for integrating operational data into a single repository is rapidly becoming popular in modern organizations. An important issue in this context is how often one should synchronize the data warehouse to reflect the changes in the constituent operational data sources. If the synchronization is performed very frequently, the associated cost might be quite high, although the data warehouse would only have a small amount of stale data. On the other hand, if the data warehouse is synchronized infrequently, it might result in costly errors in business decisions arising from the stale data. This paper examines the trade-off between the synchronization and staleness costs and derives the optimal synchronization frequency.