Conceptual Data Warehouse Design

Abstract

A data warehouse is an integrated and timevarying collection of data derived from operational data and primarily used in strategic decision making by means of online analytical processing (OLAP) techniques. Although it is generally agreed that warehouse design is a non-trivial problem and that multidimensional data models and star or snowflake schemata are relevant in this context, hardly any methods exist to date for deriving such a schema from an operational database. In this paper, we fill this gap by showing how to systematically derive a conceptual warehouse schema that is even in generalized multidimensional normal form. 1 Introduction A data warehouse is generally understood as an integrated and time-varying collection of data primarily used in strategic decision making by means of online analytical processing (OLAP) techniques. It is essentially a database that stores integrated, often historical, and aggregated information extracted from multiple, heterogeneous,...