(A) data warehouse development methodology

Abstract

Recently, many enterprises have attempted to construct data warehousing systems for decision-support. Data warehouse is an intelligent store of data that can aggregate vast amounts of information. Building DW requires two important development issues: (i) DW for the decision making of business users and (ii) metadata within it. Most DW development methodologies have not considered metadata development; it is necessary to adopt a DW development methodology which develops a DW and its metadata simultaneously. Metadata is a key to success of data warehousing system and is critical for implementing DW. That is, metadata is crucial documentation for a data warehousing system where users should be empowered to meet their own information needs; users need to know what data exists, what it represents, where it is located, and how to access it. Furthermore, metadata is used for extracting data and managing DW. However, metadata has failed because its management has been segregated from the DW development process. Metadata must be integrated with data warehousing systems. Without metadata, the decision support of DW is under the control of technical users. Therefore, integrating data warehouse with its metadata offers a new opportunity to create a more adaptive information system. This dissertation proposes a metadata-oriented data warehouse architecture that consists of seven components: legacy system, extracting software, operational data store, data warehouse, data mart, application, and metadata. Taxonomies for dataflow and metaflow is proposed for better understanding of the architecture. In addition, a metadata schema is built within the framework of the seven components. The architecture with its metadata component is applied to a real-life data warehouse for a large medical center in order to illustrate its practical usefulness. The metadata management function is concerned with security, object management, and database. The system is more likely to help manage a...