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Automatically Generating Database Schemas into OLAP Tools from Object-Oriented Multidimensional Conceptual Models

Sergio Luján-Mora
( Spanish )

Universidad de Alicante
Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos Universidad de Alicante Ap. Correos 99 E-03080 Alicante Spain
tel: +34 965 90 34 00
fax: +34 965 90 93 26
sergio.lujan@ua.es

Keywords:

analysis/design databases multidimensional conceptual modeling object-oriented models OLAP UML

Abstract:

Multidimensional (MD) modeling is the foundation of data warehouses (DW), MD databases, and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) applications. These systems provide companies with many years of historical information for the decision making process.
In the last few years, various approaches for the conceptual design of MD systems have been proposed to represent main MD structural and dynamic properties (Golfarelli et al., Sapia et al., and Tryfona et al.). These approaches provide their own graphical notations, which makes designers to learn a new specific model together with its corresponding notation for MD modeling. Furthermore, none of them has been widely accepted as a standard conceptual model for MD modeling.
The goal of my thesis is to accomplish the automatic generation of database schemas into OLAP tools from a MD conceptual model based on the object-oriented paradigm. The main steps of my thesis are:
1. Define an extension of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for MD modeling. I believe that the UML can be used to elegantly represent main structural and dynamic multidimensional properties at the conceptual level. The extension will be defined by means of stereotypes, tagged values and constraints. I will make use of the Object Constraint Language (OCL) to specify the constraints attached to the defined stereotypes, thereby avoiding an arbitrary use of these stereotypes.
2. Verify the suitability of the extension. I will develop an add-in for Rational Rose. This add-in will allow us to use the UML extension for MD modeling in Rational Rose. Therefore, we will be able to use this tool to easily design MD conceptual models.
3. Automatically generate database schemas from MD conceptual models into object-oriented and object-relational databases. It should be possible to semi-automatically generate the database schema and the MD model from MD conceptual models into OLAP tools. However, this generation process is not immediate as the semantics represented by these conceptual models are different from those considered by the underlying MD models of OLAP tools. There, it is necessary to define a generation process, where some semantics represented in the conceptual model must be transformed.
4. Implement the transformation process proposed in the previous step and test the resulting schemas in commercial products. I will define some scripts for Rational Rose that will implement the automatic generation of the MD conceptual models into some commercial products, such as Oracle, Informix, or Caché.
The main advantage of my proposal is that it is based on a well-known standard modeling language, thereby avoiding designers to learn a new specific notation or language for multidimensional systems.

The PhD work started: 01/03/2001

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Last modified on Mon Aug 15 14:59:24 2005