Issues in Developing Very Large Data Warehouses

The size of The Boeing Company posts some stringent requirements on data warehouse design and implementation. We summarize four interesting and challenging issues in developing very large scale data warehouses, namely failure recovery, incremental update maintenance, cost model for schema design and query optimization, and metadata definition and management. For each issue, we give the reasons we think it is important but not well-addressed in research literature and commercial products, and our current research to solve it.