Quarry : digging up the gems of your data treasury

Abstract

The design lifecycle of a data warehousing (DW) system is primarily led by requirements of its end-users and the complexity of underlying data sources. The process of designing a multidimensional (MD) schema and back-end extracttransform-load (ETL) processes, is a long-term and mostly manual task. As enterprises shift to more real-time and ’on-the-fly’ decision making, business intelligence (BI) systems require automated means for efficiently adapting a physical DW design to frequent changes of business needs. To address this problem, we present Quarry, an end-to-end system for assisting users of various technical skills in managing the incremental design and deployment of MD schemata and ETL processes. Quarry automates the physical design of a DW system from high-level information requirements. Moreover, Quarry provides tools for efficiently accommodating MD schema and ETL process designs to new or changed information needs of its end-users. Finally, Quarry facilitates the deployment of the generated DW design over an extensible list of execution engines. On-site, we will use a variety of examples to show how Quarry facilitates the complexity of the DW design lifecycle.