Virtual data warehouse: implementation and experimental comparison

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the virtual data warehousing (VDW) concept, by evaluating its capabilities to solve the problems that are identified in recent studies. In this study, we have developed a tool (called VDW-tool), with the capability of implementing virtual data warehouse, and proposed a framework (called 4-DEF), for evaluation of data warehouse. In order to evaluate the virtual data warehouse, we have compared its capabilities with conventional data warehouse, by means of 4-DEF framework. To demonstrate that, results from four experimental case studies are included in this paper. It is found that virtual data warehouse not only enhances schema and content flexibility, but it also provides on-the-fly data for decision support purposes. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that the performance of conventional data warehouse (DW) is slightly better than virtual data warehouse, as long as the size of DW is not too large.