I was recently talking with a few people and the concept of summary tables came up as solutions for them. The issue is, they never thought of it. Hopefully this post will help them as well as others.
Summary Tables are not a new concept. They are exactly what they sound like, basically summary of existing data. Aggregated tables, materialized views and summary tables are very dominate in data warehouses. You can also take advantage of these concepts as part of your reporting systems as well.
So summary tables are real tables. So you can take advantage of indexes and etc with them. In the examples I am using, I consider them more of a summary table than aggregated tables . Depending on your application and needs it could grow into more of an aggregated tables and or materialized views situation.
How you separate your data and tables is dependent on your reporting and application needs.
The following is a high level example of …