Model-Driven Approach to Handle Evolutions of OLAP Requirements and Data Source Model

Abstract

Data Warehouse (DW) evolution is becoming a critical research topic for several organizations mainly because their analytical data change permanently and rapidly due to changes in the data source and decision-makers’ requirements. This paper presents an MDA-compliant (Model Driven Architecture) approach and a software tool for propagating automatically the evolutions of the data source model and OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) requirements towards the multidimensional DW model. More accurately, we propose a DWE (Data Warehouse Evolution) framework. Being MDA compliant, we perform this DW evolution through Model-To-Model transformation rules we have defined as QVT (Query/View/Transformation) along with M2T (Model-To-Text) transformations realized using Acceleo templates. Thus, the evolution operations (Create table, Add column…) are firstly modeled, secondly transformed into multidimensional evolution operations (Create dimension, hierarchy…), and then are used with Acceleo templates for generating the DW alteration code.