Conceptual Data Warehouse Design

Abstract

A data warehouse is an integrated and time- varying collection of data derived from opera- tional data and primarily used in strategic deci- sion making by means of online analytical pro- cessing (OLAP) techniques. Although it is gener- ally 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 ware- house schema that is even in generalized multidi- mensional normal form.