MDA Approach for Designing and Developing Data Warehouses: A Systematic Review & Proposal

Abstract

A data warehouse (DW) is a vast repository of data that facilitates decision-making for businesses and companies. This concept dates back to the 1980s and it has been widely accepted. One of the key points for the success of the process of data warehousing lies in the definition of the warehouse model depending on data sources and analysis needs. Once the data warehouse is designed, the content and structure of the data sources, as well as the requirements analysis are required to evolve, therefore, an evolution of the model must take place (diagram and data). In this context, several approaches have been developed to design and implement data warehouses. Nevertheless, there is no standard process that deals with designing all of the data warehouse layers, also, there is no software that encompasses this type of problem. In general, the majority of these approaches focus on a particular aspect of data warehouse such as data storage, ETL process, OLAP, reporting, etc, and does not cover its entire lifecycle. A Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is a standard approach, its aims to support all phases of software manufacturing by promoting the use of models and the transformations between them. Moreover, this approach aims to automate the process of software engineering, thereby decreasing the cost of software development and enhancing its productivity. In this study, we present a systematic review of various works on the data warehouse design methods. We compare and discuss these works according to the criteria that seem relevant for this issue. We present a new design approach for multidimensional schemas construction from relational models using MDA techniques, we also develop the resulting research perspectives.