Handling inconsistencies in data warehouses

Abstract

Data warehouses (DWs) can become inconsistent when some dimensional constraints are not satisfied by the dimension instances. In this paper, we present preliminary results about the effects of the violation of partitioning constraints in homogeneous dimension instances over aggregation queries, and in particular over the summarizability property (SUMM) of the DWs. We are interested in finding ways to retrieve consistent answers even when the DW is inconsistent. We give a notion of repair for inconsistent instances based on a notion of prioritized minimization. We also describe a notion of consistent answer in DWs. © Springer-Verlag 2004.