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).

The Power of a Model-Driven Approach to Handle Evolving Data Warehouse Requirements

“…The objective of this paper is to extend our DWE (Data Warehouse Evolution Framework) (Taktak et al, 2015) initially designed to automate the propagation of changes from DS towards the multidimensional DW. This extension consists of enriching DWE to accommodate the evolution of decision-makers' needs.…”

“…DWE© is implemented on the platform Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) which is a complete environment for MDA paradigm. Figure 5 shows the overall architecture of DWE© which offers two features for evolution: i) Evolution of DW model according to changes occurred in its DS model, which is developed in (Taktak et al, 2015); ii) Evolution of the DW model to meet the new needs of decision-makers. This paper focuses on this latter feature.…”

“…Figure 1 shows our approach where the evolution of the DW model is due either to an evolution of its DS model ( Figure 1, panel A) already treated in (Taktak et al, 2015), or to an evolution of decision-makers needs (panel B) which will be the focus of this paper. For this purpose, we define an appropriate evolution model for the new decision-makers' needs; this enables us reusing our DW evolution model (Taktak et al, 2014) so that we keep the same M2T (ModelTo-Text) transformation rules for code generation.…”

“…To alleviate this problem, we proposed in (Taktak et al, 2015) an MDA (Model Driven Architecture) approach that automates the propagation of the evolution of the DS model towards its associated DW model. In this paper, we extend our contribution by considering the impacts of changes of decision-makers' requirements on the DW data-model (DW).…”