Bijoux : data generator for evaluating ETL process quality

Abstract

Obtaining the right set of data for evaluating the fulfillment of different quality standards in the extract-transform-load (ETL) process design is rather challenging. First, the real data might be out of reach due to different privacy constraints, while providing a synthetic set of data is known as a labor-intensive task that needs to take various combinations of process parameters into account. Additionally, having a single dataset usually does not represent the evolution of data throughout the complete process lifespan, hence missing the plethora of possible test cases. To facilitate such demanding task, in this paper we propose an automatic data generator (i.e., Bijoux). Starting from a given ETL process model, Bijoux extracts the semantics of data transformations, analyzes the constraints they imply over data, and automatically generates testing datasets. At the same time, it considers different dataset and transformation characteristics (e.g., size, distribution, selectivity, etc.) in order to cover a variety of test scenarios. We report our experimental findings showing the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.