Data warehouse design

Developing a data warehouse is a complex, expensive, time consuming, and prone to fail task. Different data warehouse models and methods have been presented during the last few years. However, none of them addresses the whole development process in an integrated manner.

In this website we present our data warehouse development method, based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and the Unified Process (UP), which addresses the analysis and design of both the data warehouse back-stage and front-end. For this task, we have extended the UML in order to accurately represent the different parts and properties of a data warehouse. Our proposal provides a seamless method for developing data warehouses and it is a great help when designing, implementing and deploying a data warehouse.

The main advantages of our proposal are:

• The definition of a set of UML profiles, which define an extension to the UML but keep the UML metamodel intact.
• The use of the same notation (UML) for designing the different data warehouse models and the corresponding transformations in an integrated manner.
• The use of the UML importing mechanism, which guarantees the designer that each element is defined once, because the same element can be used in different models.

Some of our publications about data warehouse design:

• Applying the UML and the Unified Process to the design of Data Warehouses (2006)
• A UML profile for multidimensional modeling in data warehouses (2006)
• Physical Modeling of Data Warehouses Using UML Component and Deployment Diagrams: Design and Implementation Issues (2006)
• Applying UML and XML for designing and interchanging information for data warehouses and OLAP applications (2004)
• A Web-Oriented Approach to Manage Multidimensional Models through XML Schemas and XSLT (2002)
• Reducing Inconsistency in Data Warehouses (2001)
• Reducing Inconsistency in Integrating Data from Different Sources (2001)