To improve the performance of visualization queries while minimizing maintenance overhead, using materialized views is the most effective solution. Here's why option C is the best choice:
Materialized Views:
Materialized views store the results of a query physically, allowing for faster access compared to regular views which execute the query each time it is accessed.
They can be automatically refreshed to reflect changes in the underlying data.
Incremental Updates:
The incremental updates capability of BigQuery materialized views ensures that only the changed data is processed during refresh operations, significantly improving performance and reducing computation costs.
This feature helps maintain up-to-date data in the materialized view with minimal processing time, which is crucial for data that needs to be no less than 4 hours old.
Performance and Maintenance:
By using materialized views, you can pre-compute and store the results of complex queries involving outer joins and analytic functions, resulting in faster query performance for data visualizations.
This approach also reduces the maintenance overhead, as BigQuery handles the incremental updates and refreshes automatically.
Steps to Implement:
Create Materialized Views:
Define materialized views for the visualization queries with the necessary configurations CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW project.dataset.view_name AS SELECT ...
FROM ...
WHERE ...
Enable Incremental Updates:
Ensure that the materialized views are set up to handle incremental updates automatically.
Reference:
Update the data visualization tool to reference the materialized views instead of running the original queries directly.
BigQuery Materialized Views
Optimizing Query Performance