Summary Combination Strategy

If you are going to build summaries manually, you will need to have some good summary combination strategies. Building summaries and summary combinations in layers is usually an efficient process. Implement the following summary combination strategies for a single summary folder:

• For frequent queries, you should provide a number of summary combinations that combine only a few (three or four) axis items. Storage space is minimized and the performance gains are maximized.

• For a wider variety of queries, you should provide a smaller number of summary combinations that combine a medium number (five to seven) of axis items. Using this approach, more storage space is required, but significant performance gains will still be realized. In essence, the larger the number of items in each combination, the better able Discoverer is to serve a wide variety of queries.

• One of the summary combinations should contain all of the items in the summary folder. This type of combination will then provide a summary that works for any combination of items in the folder.