Design of data warehouses using metadata

Data warehouses have become an instant phenomenon in many large organizations that deal with massive amounts of information. Drawing on the experiences from the systems development field, we surmise that an effective design tool will enhance the success of warehouse implementations. Thus, we present a CASE tool designed to generate the SQL queries necessary to build a warehouse from a set of operational relational databases. The warehouse designer simply specifies a list of attribute names that will appear in the warehouse, conditions if any are desired, and a description of the operational databases. The tool returns the queries needed to populate the warehouse table. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.