Data Warehouse Schema Design

A data warehouse is an integrated database primarily used in organizational decision making. Although the deployment of data warehouses is current practice in modern information technology landscapes, the methodical schema design for such databases has only been studied cursorily. In this paper we pursue schema design for data warehouses in the spirit of classical database design, organized as a sequence of requirement analysis and specification to collect user requirements, conceptual design to model the data warehouse as a multidimensional database independently from implementation issues, logical design to transform the conceptual data warehouse schema into the target data model, and physical design to maximize performance with respect to a target database system.