An MDA Approach for the Evolution of Data Warehouses

Abstract

Modeling and data warehousing have been considered, for more than one decade, as a new challenging research topic for which different approaches have been proposed. Nevertheless these proposals have focused on static aspects only. In practice, the evolution of the operational information system can lead to changes in its dependent multidimensional data warehouse (i.e. that this system feeds with data), and therefore may require the evolution of the data warehouse model. In this evolving context, the authors propose a model-driven based approach in order to automate the propagation of the evolutions occurred in the source database towards the multidimensional data warehouse. This approach is based on two evolution models, along with a set of transformation rules formalized in Query/View/Transformation. This paper describes this evolution approach for which we are developing a software prototype called DWE© (Data Warehouse Evolution).