| Data warehousing is one of the major research topics of applied-side database investigators. Most of the work to date has focused on building large centralized systems that are integrated repositories founded on pre-existing systems upon which all corporate-wide data are based. Unfortunately, this approach is very expensive and tends to ignore the advantages realized during the past decade in the area of distribution and support for data localization in a geographically dispersed corporate structure. This research investigates building distributed data warehouses with particular emphasis placed on distribution design for the data warehouse environment. This dissertation contributes by providing an architectural model for a distributed data warehouse, the formal definition of the relational data model for data warehouse, a methodology for distributed data warehouse design along with two approaches to horizontally fragment the huge fact relation in the data warehouse and an analytical technique that provides insight into which approach presented is most suited to a particular distributed data warehouse environment. |
