A Systematic Approach To Choose The Data Warehouse Architecture

In the design phase of a data warehouse, an appropriate architecture must be selected. To this aim, the engineer assesses various alternatives, depending on the requirements of the specific context. Usually, he chooses it heuristically, based on his experience. However, it must be considered that there are many parameters to be taken into consideration.In this regard, many security problems are due to poor design, as well as the performance may not be appropriate to the reference context, or the expected costs and implementation times could be exceeded. A method of choosing the architecture based on heuristics does not always require a prior and systematic evaluation of all the parameters that distinguish the different architectures and, therefore, the system is easily exposed to various problems, the first of which is the system security. Instead, all these parameters should always be considered in a systematic way, without excluding anyone, to define the importance they have in the reference context.In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to support the students and engineers during the choice of the data warehouse architecture, taking into account the needs of the specific context in which the data warehouse will be used. This approach requires a prior detection of the importance of the parameters characterizing the different architectures in the reference context. Then, a global value is defined for each architecture, which allows to compare them. Furthermore, we present an empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed approach.