Teaching and Assessing a Data Warehouse Design Course

This paper describes a course in data warehouse design that includes conceptual, logical, and physical design research. The instructional modes and assessment techniques are described and illustrated. The scope of the course is given via a discussion of the course bibliography; the bibliography includes a workshop report, "Data Warehousing at the Crossroads," created at a week-long international meeting by 18 co-authors. The paper concludes with discussion of a data warehouse conceptual modeling and schema evolution software tool that can be used to supplement the course materials. The tool is part of a larger research effort and we anticipate that it will have educational value for building student intuition and visualising the effects of schema changes.