An Automated Data Warehouse

An increasing number of organizations are implementing data warehouses to strengthen their decision support systems. This comes with the challenges of the population and the periodic update of data warehouses. In this thesis, we present a tool that provides users with features to create a warehouse database and transform structures of the source database into structures for the warehouse database. It is highly interactive, easy to use, and hides the underlying complexity of manual SQL code generation from its users. Attributes from source tables can be mapped into new attributes in the warehouse database tables using aggregate functions. Then, relevant data is automatically transported from the source database to the newly created warehouse. The tool thus integrates warehouse creation, schema mapping and data population into a single generalpurpose tool. This tool has been designed as a component of the framework for an automated data warehouse being developed at theComputer Science Department, University of New Orleans. Users of this framework are the database administrators, who will also be able to synchronize updates of multiple copies of the data warehouse. Warehouse images that need to be updated are taken offline and applications that need to access the data warehouse can now access any of the other image warehouses. The Switching Application built into this framework switches between databases in a way that is totally transparent to applications so that they do not realize existence of multiple copies of the data warehouse. In effect, even non-technical users can create, populate and update data warehouses with minimal time and effort