Modeling the physical design of data warehouses from a UML specification

A Data Warehouse (DW) is a complex information system mainly used to support strategy decisions. During the last few years, several approaches have been proposed to model different aspects of a DW. 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. In this paper, we present a proposal for the modeling of the physical design of DWs by using the component diagrams and deployment diagrams of UML. With these diagrams, we can anticipate important physical design decisions that may shorten 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. The approach presented in this paper complements our previous works for the conceptual and logical design of DWs, and therefore, to the best of our knowledge we provide the first global proposal, based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML), that allows us to cover all main design phases of DWs, from the conceptual modeling phase until the final implementation.