How to create a working pivot table without killing the system

Let's say you have a Customer table, a simple customer table with just 4 columns:

• customerCode numeric(7,0)
• customerName char(50)
• customerVATNumber char(11)
• customerLocation char(35)

Keep in mind that the customers table contains 3 million rows because there are all the customers of the last 40 years, but the active ones are only 980000.

Suppose we then have a table called Sales structured in this way:

• saleID integer
• customerCode numeric(7,0)
• agentID numeric(6,0)
• productID char(2)
• dateBeginSale date
• dateEndSale date

There are about three and a half million rows in this table (here too we have stuff from 40 years ago), but the current supplies for the various products are a total of one million. The company only sells 4 products. Each customer can purchase up to 4 products with 4 different contracts even from 4 different agents. Most (90%) buy only one, the remaining from two to 4 (those who make the complete assortment are just 4 cats).

I was asked to build a pivot table showing for each customer with it's name and location all the product he purchased and from which agent.

The proposed layout for this pivot table is:

• customerCode
• customerName
• customerLocation
• productID1
• agentID1
• saleID1
• dateBeginSale1
• dateEndSale1
• productID2
• agentID2
• saleID2
• dateBeginSale2
• dateEndSale2
• productID3
• agentID3
• saleID3
• dateBeginSale3
• dateEndSale3
• productID4
• agentID4
• saleID4
• dateBeginSale4
• dateEndSale4

I built the pivot with a view.

First I created 4 views, one for each product id on the Sales table, also useful for other statistical and reporting purposes

View1 as

• customerCode1
• productID1
• agentID1
• saleID1
• dateBeginSale1
• dateEndSale1

View2 as

• customerCode2
• productID2
• agentID2
• saleID2
• dateBeginSale2
• dateEndSale2

and so on till View4

Then i joined the 4 views with the customer table and created the PivotView i needed.

Now Select * from PivotView works perfectly.

Also Select * from PivotView Where customerLocation='NEW YORK CITY' too.

Any other request, for example: we select and count the customers residing in LOS ANGELES who have purchased the products from the same agent or from different sales agents, literally makes the machine sit down, I see the memory occupation grow (probably due to the construction of some temporary table or view) and often the execution of the query crashes.

However, if I create the same pivot on a table instead of a view the times of the various selections collapse and even if heavy (there are always about a million records to scan to verify the existence of the various conditions) they become acceptable.

For sure i am mistaking something and/or there must to be a better way to achieve the result: having a pivot built on on line data istead of one from data extracted nightly.

I'll be happy to read your comments and suggestion.

I don't clearly understand your data layout and what you need. But I'll say that the usual problem with pivoting data on Db2 for IBM i is that there's no built in way to dynamically pivot the data.

Given that you only have 4 products, the above limitation doesn't really apply.

Your problem would seem to be that by creating 4 views over the same table, you're processing records repeatedly. Instead, try to touch the data one time.

create view PivotSales as
  select 
     customerCode, 
     -- product 1
     max(case productID when '01' then productID end) as productID1,
     max(case productID when '01' then agentID end) as agentID1,
     max(case productID when '01' then saleID end) as saleID1,         
     max(case productID when '01' then dateBeginSale end) as dateBeginSale1,
     max(case productID when '01' then dateEndSale end) as dateEndSale1,
     -- product 2
     max(case productID when '02' then productID end) as productID2,
     max(case productID when '02' then agentID end) as agentID2,
     max(case productID when '02' then saleID end) as saleID2,         
     max(case productID when '02' then dateBeginSale end) as dateBeginSale2,
     max(case productID when '02' then dateEndSale end) as dateEndSale2,
     -- repeat for product 3 and 4
  from Sales
  group by customerCode;

Now you can have a CustomerSales view:

create view CustomerSales as
  select *
  from Customers join SalesPivot using (customerCode);

Run your queries, using Visual Explain to see what indexes the system suggests are needed. At minimum, you should have an indexes:

• Customer (customerCode)
• Customer (location, customerCode)
• Sales (customerCode)

I suspect that some Encoded Vector Indexes (EVI) over various columns in Sales and Customer would prove helpful. Especially since you mention "counting". An EVI keeps track of the counts of the symbols. So counting is "free". An example:

create encoded vector index customerLocEvi
 on Customers (location);

-- this doesn't have to read any rows in customer
select count(*) 
from customer 
where location = 'LOS ANGELES';

> For sure I am mistaking something and/or there must to be a better way
> to achieve the result: having a pivot built on on line data istead of
> one from data extracted nightly.

Don't be too sure about that. The DB structure that best supports Business Intelligence type queries usually doesn't match the typical transactional data structure. A periodic "extract, transform, load (ETL)" is pretty typical.

For your particular use case, you could turn CustomerSales into a Materalized Query Table (MQT), build some supporting indexes for it and just run queries directly over it. Nightly rebuild would be as simple as REFRESH CustomerSales;

Or if you wanted too, since Db2 for IBM i doesn't support SYSTEM MAINTAINED MQTs, a trigger over Sales could automatically propagate data to CustomerSales instead of rebuilding it nightly.