ANALYZING, OPTIMIZING AND REWRITING QUERIES USING MATCHING AND COMPENSATION BETWEEN QUERY AND AUTOMATIC SUMMARY TABLES

A method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for optimizing database queries using a derived summary table, wherein a definition of the summary table is based on a full select statement, including, but not limited to, a derived table involving nested GROUP BY operations and complex HAVING clauses with subqueries or joins, that is materialized in the table and describes how the summary table was derived. A query is analyzed using matching/compensation tests between the query and the definition of the summary table (that is, a query by itself) to determine whether expressions occurring anywhere in the query, but not in the summary table, can be derived using either the content in the summary table alone, or after combining (through some relational operator) the content of the summary table with other base tables, and hence the query is subsumed by or overlaps with the summary table definition.