Managing Data Warehouse Traceability: A Life-Cycle Driven Approach

Traceability has been used as a quality attribute for softwares for some decades now. Traceability can be defined as the ability to follow the life of software artifacts. Unfortunately, making a DW traceable did not have the same spring as for software systems. Nowadays, DW systems are evolving in a dynamic environment, where DW design become a complex task involving many resources and artifacts. In order to facilitate this task, a design life-cycle has been defined including five main phases. Due to the special idiosyncrasy of DW development, a tailored traceability approach is required. Our proposal in this paper is a novel DW traceability approach, driven by its design life-cycle. This approach covers the

whole

cycle and considers its inter-relationships. This study required (i) the formalization of each life-cycle phase and (ii) the identification of the interactions between and inside these phases. The traceability approach is conducted by two main activities: the

identification

of trace artifacts and links materialized in a traceability model and the

recording

of the model. The approach is illustrated using TPC-H and ETL benchmarks. It is implemented using Postgres DBMS.