Using ontologies and requirements for constructing and optimizing data warehouses

Developing database (DB) and data warehouse (DW) applications pass through three main phrases imposed by the ANSI/SPARC architecture: conceptual modeling, logical modeling and physical modeling. Some research efforts add a new ontological level above the conceptual one. This architecture has created two main actors whose presence is mandatory to ensure the success of applications: “conceptual designer” for conceptual and logical levels and “database administrators” (DBA) for physical level. Note that some administration tasks need some inputs from conceptual phase. Unfortunately, interaction between these two actors is negligible. Recently, some research and industrial efforts identify a highest cost of DBA and propose tools (advisors) to replace them, in order to ensure what we call zero-administration. The main limitation of these tools is their robustness. In this paper, we propose a new human resource management for database applications. Instead of replacing DBA, we claim to delegate some DBA tasks to conceptual designers. These tasks are usually those having inputs user requirements that may be translated to SQL queries. First, we propose a user make user requirements persistent into DWs. An analysis of requirements is given to identify SQL queries that may be used for physical design phase. Finally, a selection of indexes based on user requirements is presented and evaluated using star schema benchmark.