Architecture and quality in data warehouses: An extended repository approach

Most database researchers have studied data warehouses (DW) in their role as buffers of materialized views, mediating between update-intensive OLTP systems and query-intensive decision support. This neglects the organizational role of data warehousing as a means of centralized information flow control. As a consequence, a large number of quality aspects relevant for data warehousing cannot be expressed with the current DW meta models. This paper makes two contributions towards solving these problems. Firstly, we enrich the meta data about DW architectures by explicit enterprise models. Secondly, many very different mathematical techniques for measuring or optimizing certain aspects of DW quality are being developed. We adapt the Goal-Question-Metric approach from software quality management to a meta data management environment in order to link these special techniques to a generic conceptual framework of DW quality. The approach has been implemented in full on top of the ConceptBase repository system and has undergone some validation by applying it to the support of specific quality-oriented methods, tools, and application projects in data warehousing. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.