Physical modeling of data warehouses using UML

Abstract

During the few last years, several approaches have been proposed to model different aspects of a Data Warehouse (DW), such as the conceptual model of the DW, the design of the ETL (Extraction, Transformation, Loading) processes, the derivation of the DW models from the enterprise data models, etc. At the end, a DW has to be deployed to a database environment and that takes many decisions of a physical nature. However, few efforts have been dedicated to the modeling of the physical design (i.e. the physical structures that will host data together with their corresponding implementations) of a DW from the early stages of a DW project. From our previously presented DW engineering process, in this paper we present our proposal for the modeling of the physical design of DWs by using the component diagrams and deployment diagrams of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Our approach allows the designer to anticipate important physical design decisions that may reduce the overall development time of a DW such as replicating dimension tables, vertical and horizontal partitioning of a fact table, the use of particular servers for certain ETL processes and so on. Moreover, our approach allows the designer to cover all main design phases of DWs, from the conceptual modeling phase until the final implementation, as we show with an example in this paper.

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