A Method for Data Warehouse Design - Data Warehouse Systems: Design and Implementation - page 378

Chapter 10
A Method for Data Warehouse Design
Even though there is an abundant literature in the area of software
development, few publications have been devoted to the development of
data warehouses. Most of them are written by practitioners based on their
experience in building data warehouses. On the other hand, the scientific
community has proposed a variety of approaches, which in general target
a specific conceptual model and are too complex to be used in real-world
environments. As a consequence, there is still a lack of a methodological
framework that could guide developers in the various stages of the data
warehouse development process.
In this chapter, building over several existing approaches, we describe
a general method for data warehouse design. We use the Northwind case
study to illustrate the methodology. In Sect. 10.1 ,wepresenttheexisting
approaches to data warehouse design. Then, in Sect. 10.2 , we refer to the
various phases that make up the data warehouse design process. Analogously
to traditional database design, the methodology includes the phases of
requirements specification, conceptual design, logical design, and physical
design. The subsequent sections are devoted to more detailed descriptions
of each design phase. In Sect. 10.3 , we describe three different approaches to
requirements specification. These approaches differ in which is the driving
force for specifying requirements: users, source systems, or both. Section 10.4
covers conceptual design for data warehouses. In Sects. 10.5 and 10.6 ,we
briefly describe the logical and physical design phases for data warehouses,
extensively covered in Chaps. 5 and 7 . We just provide this description to
give a complete self-contained vision of the method. Section 10.7 highlights
the advantages and disadvantages of the three approaches.