SAMSTAR: An automatic tool for generating star schemas from an entity-relationship diagram

Abstract

While online transaction processing (OLTP) databases are modeled with Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERDs), data warehouses constructed from these OLTP DBs are usually represented as star schema. Designing data warehouse schemas, however, is very time consuming. We present a prototype system, SAMSTAR, which automatically generates star schemas from an ERD. The system takes an ERD drawn by ERwin Data Modeler as an input and generates star schemas. SAMSTAR uses the Connection Topology Value [1] which is the syntactic structural information embedded in an ERD. SAMSTAR displays the resulting star schemas on a computer screen graphically. With this automatic generation of star schema, this system helps designers reduce their efforts and time in building data warehouse schemas. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.