Review

Standard commercial practice is to bulk-load a data warehouse, typically every night. With global operations, many corporations are finding that they do not have a "night" when they can bring down the warehouse for several hours to perform the needed load. Also, with the increasing speed of reposnse requirements, many companies find that they cannot afford to wait until next morning to analyze inormation in the warehouse -- they need records of operational data indexed and available in the warehouse essentially instantaneously.

I had studied this problem, with some colleagues, a couple of years ago [2]. This paper takes a considerable step beyond what we had, and provides an elegant technique to index data on-the-fly for high-volume insertions.