Using Design Guidelines to Improve Data Warehouse Logical Design

Data Warehouse-(DW) logical design often start with a conceptual schema and then generates relational structures. Applying this approach implies to cope with two main aspects: (i) -mapping the conceptual model structures to the logical model ones, and (ii) -taking into account implementation issues, which are not considered in the conceptual schema. This paper addresses this second aspect and presents a formalism that allows the DW designer to specify design guidelines which express design strategies related with implementation requirements. Through these guidelines the designer states high level manners to cope with different design problems, for example: managing complex and big dimensions, dimension versioning, different user profiles accessing to different attributes, high summarized data, horizontal partitions of historical data, generic dimensionality and non-additive measures. This work is part of a DW logical design environment, where the design guidelines are specified through a graphical editor and then automatically processed in order to build the logical schema.