Data Warehouse Design for E-Commerce Environments

Data warehousing and electronic commerce are two of the most rapidly expanding fields in recent information technologies. In this paper, we discuss the design of data warehouses for e-commerce environments. We discuss requirement analysis, logical design, and aggregation in e-commerce environments. We have collected an extensive set of interesting OLAP queries for e-commerce environments, and classified them into categories. Based on these OLAP queries, we illustrate our design with data warehouse bus architecture, dimension table structures, a base star schema, and an aggregation star schema. We finally present various physical design considerations for implementing the dimensional models. We believe that our collection of OLAP queries and dimensional models would be very useful in developing any real-world data warehouses in e-commerce environments.